lomonaaeren

Chapter Seven.

Title: Seasons of War (8/?)
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 Eight—Behind Death

Harry felt a cold wind blow around him when he was still some distance from the tent that housed Nusquam. It tugged at his hair and made him feel, briefly, as if someone held the point of a knife to his neck. Then it hurried past him and flung itself into the camp. Harry heard the walls of canvas ripple and rustle, and the noise of ropes cracking.

It was only a bit of wind. There was no reason it should have made him start running as if his feet were on fire.

But it did, and at the same moment, he felt that sharp prickling sensation in his right shoulder that Draco had described when Harry was in danger. Harry fell on his knees before the small tent flap and crawled breathlessly inside, trying to watch everything at once so he would have a chance of knowing what was happening.

Draco sat on the floor in an awkward position, one hand extended and eyes utterly still. Harry knew he wasn’t unconscious, or his head would have fallen forwards, but he didn’t know what was wrong.

A tendril of thick darkness extended out from Nusquam to touch him. Nusquam was still in bonds, but her face wasn’t her own, and Harry thought that was all that was needed to put Draco in danger. He could only see a swimming golden whirlwind where her face had been, in fact, and although it didn’t focus on him at the moment, a shiver went down his spine anyway.

Gregory was dancing about, screaming wordlessly and hurling curses Harry had never seen before. All of them stopped a few feet away from Nusquam, or Nihil, or whatever combination of the two it was now, as if they’d hit an invisible Shield Charm. Harry nodded. He wouldn’t waste time trying to reach them by conventional means, then.

He dropped to one knee behind Draco and reached up to clasp his shoulders. Draco’s skin was freezing beneath his touch, so stiff that it burned his fingers. Harry gritted his teeth and managed to ignore that. He had to hang on. He had no idea why, because he didn’t have much of a defensive strategy, but he knew that much.

The mask of Nihil/Nusquam focused on him then. Harry saw a brief glimpse of what might have been white teeth, and another dark arm lashed out of the bound figure, traveling straight towards him. Its end was curved, Harry saw, and had suckers on the end like an octopus’s tentacle.

He lowered his head and bit savagely at his arm, tearing his head sideways so that a bloody wound opened up. The blood dripped down his elbow but didn’t reach the ground before the tendril hit him. Harry would have to hope that the mere use of the blood was enough, and that it didn’t matter whether it hit the ground or formed into a ring.

The coldness and darkness surrounded him, but Harry kept his concentration on the colder skin of Draco’s shoulders for a moment, and—

He didn’t know how to describe it, afterwards. He knew what it felt like, and that was all.

He reached out and lashed his magic through the blood, and the coldness, and all the sensations that he was feeling at that small, tiny point in time. He knew the right directions because he could feel. He could feel Draco, and the blood dripping warmly down his arm, and the aching pain of the wound. He channeled his magic through it the way he would channel it through a wand, and then screamed a challenge into the mouth of the tunnel that he could feel gaping to swallow him.

“Attack!”

The word was in Parseltongue; he was already thinking about the image of a snake, holding it firmly in his mind, the same great cobra with a spread hood that he had used to defend himself from the shadow of Lucius Malfoy.

The darkness boiled in front of him, and suddenly he could see the snake. Harry hadn’t realized how much he was missing color until he saw it just then. This was dark green, with here and there flecks of dark blue, and black where the hood had cobra markings. Harry blinked. He hadn’t realized that he had envisioned it so clearly, or that he would see it this way. Where had the blue come from?

The cobra’s head swung to face him, and Harry realized, with a start, that he should stop thinking about stupid things like that. He gestured forwards with his head, or what he thought was his head, and hissed the command again. “Find the one who is trying to hurt me and my mate.” This wasn’t the time to worry about what kind of word for Draco the Parseltongue would find. “Kill him.”

The cobra slithered away into the dark. Harry clamped his fingers down on Draco’s shoulders again and began to tug, trying to think of some way he could move Draco spiritually as well as physically out of the trap.

Only when the darkness glittered again, this time with small, brown-gold, fast-moving snakes, did he realize that he already had an idea.

*

Draco was locked in a freezing vault, and he was learning despair.

The lessons pounded home each time with the crack of huge icicles being driven into his body. He was pinned and stretched out on the wall of a glacier, and Nihil’s voice laughed in his ears. Draco lost the memory of a loving embrace as he lay there, and the taste of honey, and the sight of a sunrise.

He could still remember the words. They were still in his mind. Nihil couldn’t take that from him—at least, not yet. But no image came to him when he stretched his memory after them, and less sensation.

You will learn all the lessons that I did, Nihil’s voice told him, and Draco hated that he clung to the words, because at least they were something that he could hear, something different from the endless darkness and silence and cold.

The chains holding him broke apart. Now he drifted, and was drawn by a powerful current towards something that brushed him with rough, sharp edges. Draco thought he was bleeding, and then realized that he had no idea if living concepts like that applied here. He floated and tumbled, and the stream slammed him against more edges and then began to push knowledge into his head.

In the moment when Nihil had become what he now was, as the souls and bodies and magic of two brothers blended, driven by the intense wish to escape pain, he had learned what lay behind death.

The words ripped and tore at Draco. The words weren’t the means of their delivery; these weren’t things Nihil was saying. It was, rather, the way that Draco’s mind chose to process the information. He struggled again to escape, and could find nothing, no way to fight, no way to flee the consuming grip. He was in nothing.

Behind death lay stillness, and there lay change. That was the great mistake of the necromancers and the others who knew nothing about death except the common superstitions that they had learned from questioning captured necromancers. They thought of death as the realm of permanence and life as the realm of change. But death did change, by slow and incomprehensible ticks, the way that an insect in amber might not realize it was in amber and go on moving, limb by slow limb.

Draco sobbed. His head felt near to bursting, and still the information fell on top of him like cold sand and forced its way through his ears. He wondered if he would die before the end. He wondered what he looked like right now.

Nihil had learned that transformation, and how to master it. Nihil was that transformation, drawn out of the corners of death, gathered in one place, and given a will and a purpose. He could transform his spirits and his lives in ways unknown to the living. He did not grow or decay or slide into uselessness the way that the changes of the living did. He was simply and subtly what he always wanted to be, and resistance to him was weak because the others had to work through clumsy materials, while Nihil dwelt solely and simply in a realm of will. He was the voice of the dead, the will of the dead as they had always wanted to be.

Draco thought he would die if he had to take much more of this, this relentless crushing and pounding. Or he would simply turn into powder and become one of Nihil’s servants and weapons. He could see how it happened now. Aran had probably resisted; Dearborn might have tried to keep some sense of a separate identity. But that grinding maw took them in, and when they came out again, they’d been digested.

This was how to move. This was how to change. Nihil would teach him, and he would no longer be what he had been, a spirit in a body. He would be the changes of death locked in a body that he need no longer fear to leave, because it would never decay—

Something heavy struck him. Draco opened his eyes and stared into the darkness, wondering whether it would be worthwhile to cry out, because this sensation was at least different from the ones that he had experienced so far.

The blow came again. Draco turned his head—and it did seem that he had a head again, after long moments of being an aching, useless set of separated pieces in the dark. He could feel that the blow was coming from the side, while the cold and the pounding of Nihil’s teeth had seemed to come from straight ahead.

“Help!” he called, just in case.

The blow came again, and then the darkness tore into light and color, and a swarm of snakes moving over him.

Draco tried not to tense and throw the snakes off. He didn’t think they were here to hurt him. In fact, remembering that Harry could speak to snakes and use them as illusions in his spells, he was virtually certain that they weren’t.

A snarl seemed to roll all around him, or perhaps it was only a dense vibration of the kind that Draco imagined he would hear if he was inside a mouth when it snarled. Nihil’s teeth began to draw him in again. Draco struggled and opened his arms to the snakes. If his own will could make a difference in this contest, he would give it to them and gladly.

He did think that he saw another snake shoot past overhead, something glowing green and blue and black. He hoped that it was attacking Nihil, since it pushed straight into the maw trying to devour him and didn’t come back.

For a moment, Draco reflected, in humiliation, that he wasn’t going to get the chance to matter or be powerful this time.

Then he smiled, and began to fight even harder, hoping that he was distracting Nihil from the war he had with Harry. He did have something to offer, something different and valuable, if he could get out of Nihil’s trap alive.

He knew what Nihil saw in death, what he could do there, what the source of his power was. Probably no one else had ever come this far and then managed to escape; they had been transformed into part of Nihil instead. Draco might not have the magic to fight Nihil, but he had the knowledge.

He lunged against his bonds, and felt the ice gripping him hesitate and draw back, lessening. Immediately he sat up and flung himself along with the retreating swarm of snakes in the direction of light.

Or, at least, in the direction that was the opposite of Nihil. Draco wouldn’t mind if he found out that it was full of darkness, as long as it was a different kind of darkness from the one that was eating him.

*

Harry had no idea what he was doing, but that had never stopped him before. He hadn’t been sure how his death would defeat Voldemort, either, since if he had died that would have got rid of the Horcrux but not killed him.

But he had walked into the Forbidden Forest and stood in front of Voldemort to receive the Killing Curse anyway, and now he was pouring himself into the battle with Nihil the same way.

The brown snakes danced around Draco, and where they danced, the darkness pulled back. Harry still wasn’t sure what it was about his magic that Nihil couldn’t stand. If Portillo Lopez was right and there was a combination of life and death in his magic, presumably Nihil couldn’t bear the life part.

And the cobra sank its fangs into the darkness and thrashed back and forth, shaking it to pieces, swallowing the cold that Nihil tried to feed it and dissipating it. The cobra wasn’t real, only an illusion supercharged by Harry’s imagination and blood, and it couldn’t be hurt in the same way that a living creature swallowing that darkness would.

Nihil screamed. Harry shuddered as the ripples passed his ears, and then decided that he didn’t have to care about the sound. He was going to rescue Draco and hurt Nihil badly enough to convince him to retreat. Everything else could wait.

The brown snakes were pulling Draco with them now. It was easier, and Harry didn’t know why. Perhaps Draco had figured out they were friends and wasn’t fighting them, which he thought would have made everything harder.

The cobra bit and drank and swallowed, and still Nihil lashed at it ineffectually. Harry wondered if Nihil could actually learn how to fight a creature that combined life and death magic, and hoped not.

I know you.

The icy voice spoke from within his head, rather than brushing past it on the outside as the shriek had. Harry shivered, but continued to pour the magic into his blood and his illusions and concentrate on his battles.

I know that you are not different from me. I know that you took up necromancy because you wanted the dead to return. The voice altered, dipping down and growing softer, so that it sounded like the voices Harry had sometimes used to argue with himself about necromancy in the depths of the night. Have you forgotten the duty you owe to them?

Harry gritted his teeth. Yes, the temptation was still there, beating like a pulse beneath the surface of his mind, but he knew where his duty lay, with the living.

I wanted to rescue the living, too. I became what I am because I wanted to rescue my brother. I suffered at the hands of Death Eaters, like you. Why are we so different? Look me in the eye, and I could tell you what I am. Perhaps you would find sympathy in me. Perhaps we would come to understand each other.

Harry focused on Draco. He thought Draco was almost to him, wherever that was. The small brown snakes were losing some of their strength as they got closer, because Harry had only created them to find Draco, and their work was almost done.

Would the dead want you to give up the chance to summon them back to life? Sirius Black’s life was cut short, and he would want to live. Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks…wouldn’t it be right for them to return and live out their lives as parents of their child? I can do nothing about their natural deaths in time, but these were unnatural. Come, let me summon them. I know where their spirits must rest.

“You can’t do that,” Harry muttered between clenched teeth, and then wanted to tell himself off for listening to Nihil. He had to pull. He had to bite. He had to be ready to draw the snake illusions back into himself and disengage from the battle, though he wasn’t at all sure how he would do that.

Yes, I can. Nihil’s voice was almost gentle now. I own this sea. I swim in it as you swim in the sea of life, all unconscious, unknowing of what you do. But I am a double-sided creature, and I know.

The darkness flickered in front of Harry, and he saw the faces of the spirits as he had seen them waiting on the other side in the one pure necromantic ritual he had ever performed. Sirius was leaning forwards, his eyes yearning, the way Harry imagined he must have looked when he was breaking out of Azkaban. Remus and Tonks leaned on each other, robes blowing around them in an unnatural wind. Fred wasn’t far behind them, giving Harry an uncertain smile and mouthing words that Harry turned his head away from.

You would disdain them? Nihil’s voice dripped with sugary disappointment. Then I am sure that you will not care if I do this.

Whips lunged down from above and slammed into Remus and Tonks, driving them to their knees. A hot knife scraped the skin from Sirius’s back. Fred was twisted as though someone had him in two giant hands, and Harry saw his head pop from his shoulders.

Harry bit his tongue. Blood was running down his chin, and he focused through it, reaching out to Draco again with pure magic.

I chose the living.

Nihil’s voice said something in his ears, faint and far away, but Harry didn’t listen to it. He had hold of Draco now, with snakes and with spirit, and was pulling on him so hard that he thought he might have been able to reel him in even if Draco was resisting.

The cold wind flickered around his hair and ears, the way it had when he first approached the tent. Nihil snarled, and Harry felt it reverberate through his bones. His vision danced with the images of the dead.

I will not forget this, Nihil said.

“I thought you never forgot anything,” Harry gasped, and the words were no sooner out of his mouth than he felt Nihil’s hold on Draco loosen. Draco practically slammed into him, and his snakes faded, and together they fell out of the darkness that Nihil had drawn Draco into.

One more time, coldness touched Harry’s ears like snowflakes, and Nihil whispered, I have thought, and studied. And I have decided. You will be destroyed in the same way as all the others who stand to oppose me.

Harry would have liked to say that he’d never expected any special treatment, but they were back in light, and Gregory was kneeling over them demanding an explanation. Harry opened his eyes and saw Nusquam sagging forwards in her bonds. He couldn’t see her face and didn’t know if she was still physically present or not, but he didn’t see that it mattered as long as she wasn’t moving.

Draco, and Gregory, were the more pressing concerns to deal with.

*

Of all the sensations Draco had missed, the greatest was warmth.

He huddled against Harry’s body, listening to his heartbeat and the way he shivered and sighed when he spoke to Gregory. He was grateful that Harry’s hand never ceased stroking his hair, and that Harry seemed to know instinctively that Draco needed his heat, because he never moved away, either.

Draco imagined that they made an undignified picture, sprawled on the floor of the tent, draped over each other as though Gregory had caught them in the act of making love. For once, he didn’t care, couldn’t care. He tightened his grip on Harry’s arm, and Harry squeezed his hand once and then went back to answering questions. Draco reckoned he should listen to the questions and try to comprehend how they related to him. He was past the first moments of needing extreme comfort now.

“I want you to tell me what you did,” said Gregory. Draco smiled in spite of himself. That was Gregory, requiring information so that she could duplicate or at least understand every action that someone else took.

“It’s hard to describe,” Harry said tiredly. “You know that I’ve been working with Portillo Lopez. She’s discovered that my magic, the magic that I use when I’m supposedly performing necromancy, is a mixture of the forces of life and death. Nihil could take control of me or fight me easily if I only used one or the other, but not both. I used my blood and the illusions of snakes, which respond to Parseltongue, to reach after Draco and to bring him back.” His hands tightened on Draco’s shoulders. Draco tilted his head so that his brow rested against Harry’s chest. He understood all the things he knew Harry would find it difficult to put into words.

“Back,” said Gregory, as though that innocent word was the key to fighting Nihil and Harry was wrong to hide it from her. “Where did he go? I could see his body kneeling here all the time you supposedly fought for him.”

“Where do you go when you dream?” Harry snapped, and Draco would have liked to applaud the retort, if only his arms weren’t so tired. “It was a place like that. In mind, in imagination, or something more. I know that I stopped Nihil from consuming Draco and stopped him from taking my mind over. That’s all I care about right now.”

Draco thought that the right place to clear his throat and join the conversation. “We have something more,” he said.

“Oh, thank God you’re still sane,” Harry said, in a rush of emotion dense enough that Draco wasn’t surprised it made his voice thick, and then bowed his head. Draco felt more than one drop of salt water on his face. He found Harry’s hand and squeezed it back. He would have to do something nice for Harry—for them both—after Gregory was done interrogating them. And he thought he knew what, though it would require him to rest first.

“Yes, I am,” Draco said. “More than that. Nihil told me certain things about what it was like to be behind death, and what he was, and I escaped with them. I can’t imagine that’s common.”

“What is he?” Gregory switched her targets in a moment, from Harry to him. Draco twisted around to face her, glad that his shivering body remained in contact with Harry. He honestly didn’t think he could stand on his own right now.

“Something that controls the change behind death,” Draco said. “Portillo Lopez had told us that change separated life and death, that death is made of stillness and life of growth. But apparently there’s a different kind of transformation that Nihil exploits when he moves spirits from body to body or creates new people from himself, like Nusquam. He told me it was like the movement an insect might experience in amber.”

“But insects in amber don’t move.” Gregory frowned at him as if she thought he was trying to make a fool of her.

“No one can survive death the way Nihil can, either,” Draco snapped. “It’s a paradox, and we’ll have to treat it that way and use it for what we can, rather than rejecting it because it can’t exist.”

Gregory paused, then, to Draco’s utter surprise, dipped her head to him. “You are right,” she said. “I apologize.”

Draco would have gaped at Harry, inviting him to share his surprise, if they were alone. As it was, Harry seemed to take the apology for a break in the interrogation, and curled his arms around Draco, helping him to his feet. “We’re going back to our tent now,” he said firmly, “to sleep through the rest of our evening.”

Gregory smiled. “I don’t blame you. I shall secure Nusquam, if she lives.”

As they left the tent, Draco realized that he didn’t care at all if Nusquam was still alive. Perhaps he should be bothered by that, but considering she’d never been properly alive in the first place, he wasn’t.

“Are you really all right?” Harry whispered as they limped and staggered along. “Draco, I was so worried—”

Draco raised his head, gripped Harry’s chin, and kissed him by way of response. He made sure to use his tongue as much as he could when he was this exhausted, to lick the back of Harry’s teeth and to bite at his lips. When he pulled back, Harry looked pleasantly dazed.

“Yes, I’m well,” Draco whispered. “Simply tired. Thank you.”

Harry kissed him behind the ear and helped him the rest of the way to their tent, where they fell into bed together. Draco had planned to remain awake and spin a few devious plots to ensure Harry got all the rewards he deserved.

He managed about half of one before he fell asleep.