lomonaaeren

Chapter Nine.

Title: Seasons of War (9/?)
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 Ten—Their First Weapon

“It is dreaming while you are awake. It might be easier for you to think of it that way.”

Harry gritted his teeth. Just like all the other “easy” explanations that Portillo Lopez had come up with so far, he didn’t think this one was particularly simple. “I can’t dream while I’m awake,” he said. “I can daydream. Is that what you mean?”

Portillo Lopez shook her head almost hard enough for the scarf to slide off her hair. They stood in a bubble of warmth beyond the camp, towards the place where they had kept Nusquam. Gregory leaned against a table that Harry thought she had conjured for the specific purpose of leaning—although Portillo Lopez had quickly taken it over with the hanks of thread and boxes of metal pieces that she seemed to need—watching critically. Draco stood just behind Harry and smoothed his shoulder with one hand now and then.

“Daydreams are too fragile to contain the information that must move through them,” Portillo Lopez said. “Dreams are stronger and have some existence independent of us, in that we do not control them and alter them at our pleasure as we do with daydreams. And they take us behind the world, though through the route of the mind rather than through the route of death, unlike the road that Nihil has discovered.”

Draco must have sensed Harry’s tension, because he squeezed Harry’s shoulder reassuringly and cut in before Harry could say anything. “I don’t think the magical theory is necessary.” He turned Harry to face him. “What did you do when you realized that I was in trouble? How did you reason out the best course of action?”

“I didn’t,” Harry snapped. He had already said this, and he couldn’t comprehend why Draco would want to hear it again. He was usually impatient with repetition. “I saw you in trouble. I grabbed you and tore open a wound so that I could use blood for my necromancy. I didn’t make any conscious effort to go after you, because I didn’t know what had happened. I only know that I was following you a few seconds later.”

“Ah,” Portillo Lopez said, and smiled at him. “I should have known. Yes, you would find it harder to follow the road if you took your first steps onto it unwittingly. In this case, Nihil provided the means for you to walk it. You will have to learn to walk it on your own, and that is a separate process.”

“That’s the first bloody thing she’s said that made sense,” Harry muttered. Draco murmured soothingly in his ear while Portillo Lopez seized one of the threads from the table and pulled it taut between her hands.

“You know that you can use a piece of string to escape a maze,” Portillo Lopez said. “Lay it down behind you, and it provides a trail that you can follow if you get lost.” She brought her fingers closer together and looped them through the thread. “Of course, that is not the only game one may play with it.” She moved both hands in a complex pattern, and Harry was looking at a spiderweb, a bigger one that he had thought could have been spun from a single piece of thread.

“Yes,” Harry said, since Portillo Lopez had paused and looked at him, apparently expecting him to say something.

Portillo Lopez glanced back at her web. “The method of entering the road is the hardest part, but once there, you must also lay down a trail so that you can find your way back. In your case, you were able to use the blood from your wound. The sensation of warmth and life would call to you, given the contrast of darkness and cold all around you. But others, such as your partner, do not have that ability.”

“I can lay down the road,” Harry said, “but I don’t know how to enter. On the other hand, Draco seems to understand your theory but he wouldn’t be able to find his way back even if he bled before he went in. So why don’t both of us work together at once, and counter our weaknesses like that?”

Portillo Lopez went silent. Gregory straightened up from her leaning posture on the table and clapped her hands together using only her fingertips. Draco dipped his head and whispered into Harry’s ear, “You are very clever.”

“Of course,” Portillo Lopez said, before Harry could finish absorbing the shock and the sweetness of Draco’s compliment. “You already work together as partners and you already share compatible magic. Why did I not envision you working together as a pair when it came to this?” She sounded vexed with herself.

“Everyone has a weakness,” Gregory said. Harry wondered if Portillo Lopez would pick up on the sarcasm in her voice. Portillo Lopez might have, because she glanced at her sharply, but Gregory was staring so intently at Draco and Harry that she could claim to have missed that. “Well? I do not understand the theory, either. How do you propose to go behind death, Trainee Malfoy? And how do you know you will not get lost there?”

Harry turned around in interest. He’d like to know the answers to those questions, too. And it was nice to have the burden of doing the impossible resting on someone else for once.

*

Draco smiled. He hoped the smile would conceal his lack of confidence about what exactly he was going to do next. He understood the theory, but that was a long way from putting it into operation, as more than one of Professor Snape’s students had learned.

But he would not show weakness in front of the instructors, and Harry looked at him with eyes full of a shining trust that Draco would give his life not to damage. He reached out and took the thread from Portillo Lopez’s hands.

“I see the world differently than either you or she does,” he explained to Harry, trying to ignore the way Gregory gave a thin smile. Perhaps she knows this is a delaying tactic. But Draco didn’t intend to let her criticism worry him. “I see the weakness of the barriers, perhaps, more strongly, and I have more control over my thoughts and emotions, so the dreaming awake analogy makes more sense to me.”

Harry didn’t waste time barking that he did so have control over his thoughts and emotions, the way Draco had thought he would. He nodded as if accepting the obvious and waited for more. Draco licked his lips and unfolded the string, tying a loop at the end of it and beginning to swing it around his head.

“I can also keep the paradox that Nihil told me about in mind. The idea of the fly moving in amber who doesn’t know it’s trapped and so can keep up that slow motion—slow only to someone looking at it from the outside, not to the fly. Nihil moves in different ways than we do, has his changes in clockwork positions, but that’s still movement, that’s still change.” Draco swung the rope faster and fixed his eyes in front of him.

It took little to no effort to remember the sensations that had flooded him when Nihil pulled him into the dark. The memories that had leaked from his head. The icy teeth grinding into his limbs. The sense of hopelessness and despair.

Emotion was a kind of motion. Draco could feel the memories overwhelming him, the world they described replacing and wavering into the world that he stood in. He could still feel the sunlight, but distantly. He was amazed, privately, that Harry had been able to use his blood as a guide back to the real world. The sensations of the one where Nihil lived were so much more powerful.

Shivers struck his spine and gripped his limbs. Draco could feel the string in his hand, but only the way he might have been able to feel a piece of ice with numb limbs. His body froze, and his mind leaped out of his head and pushed back the barriers.

At the last moment, he felt hands lock onto his shoulders as someone came with him. He was dimly grateful for that.

*

Harry had no doubt that they now stood in the same world Nihil had pulled Draco into. The darkness was the same, and the despair that crept over him, and the hanging cold that he could feel hissing past his ears in a motion that wasn’t motion, like a frozen wind.

And he had no idea how Draco had done it. From what he’d seen, Draco had simply focused his gaze vaguely ahead, maybe using the spinning string to hypnotize himself, and gone into this place without moving. When the string had snapped taut, the loop at the end of it vibrating as if hooked over the neck of an invisible fly, Harry had lunged forwards and gripped Draco instinctively.

It was a good thing he had, he thought as his teeth began to chatter.

Draco was moving ahead of him in odd ways, creating dark silver ripples through the darkness that Harry could barely see. Now and then the string trembled, but it didn’t move. Harry gritted his teeth and wondered for a moment how they were going to get back, since he hadn’t spilled his blood this time.

Well, he could try to correct that. He removed one of his hands from Draco’s shoulder and lifted it to his mouth.

He couldn’t feel or find the skin. His teeth were chattering too hard to bite anyway. He glanced over his shoulder and saw nothing there but endless night, closed in thick and muffling as a fog.

We’re going to die here.

Harry clenched his teeth down, grinding them against each other to produce a modicum of sensation, and thought that it was probably hard to die when they were already behind death. He just had to find another way out of this situation, that was all.

Let’s see. What had he had last time? Necromancy that wasn’t necromancy. Snakes. Blood. A driving desire to see Draco rescued that meant he could fight against Nihil, will pitched against will, and win.

That’ll have to be enough right now, since I don’t have anything else, Harry thought, and slid his arms down Draco’s neck until they were clasping the front of his chest. Draco’s skin was like ice or metal under his hands, or perhaps petrified wood; Harry thought he had already lost the ability to distinguish between textures that similar. He thought of the way Draco had made love to him yesterday, the warmth and sliding of his body, the feeling of Draco’s cock in his arse.

A twinge of pain soared through his muscles at the reminder, and Harry nearly groaned before he realized what that meant. If he could still feel something like this, then he might be able to feel other things, and each feeling would draw them closer and closer to the world they had left behind them.

Harry clenched his arse down, remembered the way Draco’s eyes shone and the bruising grip of his fingers on Harry’s hips, and began moving backwards, step by step. He didn’t glance over his shoulder. He saw no reason to dishearten himself with the sight of a “landscape” that didn’t move or change.

*

Draco knew he wasn’t alone. Harry was at his back, yes, but in a distant way. They might have stood there with a pane of glass between them. Draco’s attention was focused in front of him, on the darting, swimming things that plunged past him and then turned and came back again to study him without any sound.

He couldn’t see them, either. He could sense them, but not as he would sense most other things, with a brush of wind against his cheek or a nearness that raised the hair on his spine. He no longer had cheeks or a spine here. His body was one whole plane of being and nothingness, like the insect trapped in amber.

Instead, he felt them as if he were in a dream.

Think of this as a dream and it will be less frightening, Draco told himself, though he knew he should experience fear only in an academic way. He felt interest instead. He waited until one of the plunging forms was next to him, drifting close enough to alter and stir the darkness and cold, and then shifted his perception. He could dream awake. That meant controlling, at least in part, what happened in the dream.

In seconds, or some other longer measure of time—it didn’t matter, since both were equally meaningless here—he held a thrashing thing that resembled, so much as it resembled anything, a desperate fish.

Draco glanced over his shoulder, ready to tell Harry that he had something valuable and they could return to the real world.

He saw nothing. Blackness unrolled behind him. The ice encased his limbs and rendered both them and the creature he cradled motionless. He was already beginning to forget light, the way he had when Nihil held him prisoner.

No.

He hadn’t given up last time, under far more hopeless circumstances. Draco leaned backwards, trying to convey the truth to Harry by the pressure of his back and shoulders. If Harry could feel them—and of course he could—he would know that Draco was ready to leave this place and come out from behind death.

*

Harry closed his eyes. He knew they might burn with tears, though heat was harder to imagine than most of the other things he was currently feeling. But Draco had pressed against him, and that indicated he still had his own spirit and desires. Harry took a step backwards, keeping his hands locked in place on Draco’s chest, pulling Draco with him perforce.

Draco didn’t reach back to help, for some reason. Perhaps his hands were stretched out in front of him to explore as much as they could of Nihil’s domain before he was pulled back, Harry thought. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need to speculate on that part of this journey, because Draco was the one who had handled it and the one who would give him a coherent account—or not—when they were back with Gregory and Portillo Lopez.

Draco was above him, pushing into him, his eyes wide and wild. Draco was above him on the bed in Malfoy Manor, this time accepting Harry’s cock into his arse, his head tilting back and his throat working as he struggled to gulp back words. Harry could taste his tongue, hear the crunch his teeth made when they came together in crisp food, and smell the very slightly scented shampoo that he’d tended to use when they still shared a room in the barracks.

Harry thought and remembered, thought and remembered, and, when the coldness of the world around him seemed to drain those memories dry, thought of new ones rather than clinging to the old. He had many, didn’t he? He and Draco had been friends for more than a year, lovers for months. That was plenty.

He raised barriers against the darkness around them, barriers of perception and desire, and the darkness snapped away and dripped down the walls of the world like tar.

Harry gasped and found himself on his knees in the bubble of warmth, his hands still locked faithfully around Draco’s chest. Draco did cough and tug at Harry’s arms, and Harry realized that there might be a problem with blocking Draco’s air supply, now that he was kneeling. He sheepishly let him go.

“You nearly died.”

Portillo Lopez was stooping over them, shaking her head. Harry looked at her through hazy eyes and wondered what she would do if he pulled off her head-scarf. It was making a bid for freedom anyway.

“Next time,” Portillo Lopez said, “you must bleed before you go into Nihil’s world. It is a surprise that you made it back at all. You used memories, but memories are fragile things, and if you had spent too long in the darkness without thinking of that tactic, you might have lost them all without finding the way back.” She reached down and took Harry’s hand, squeezing it. Harry gasped. His fingers were waking up from what felt like intense sleep with a chorus of pins and needles. “Did you think?”

“Not really,” Harry admitted. “I just wanted Draco safe.”

“I’m more than safe.”

Draco turned around. Harry stared. He had an ingot of blue-black in his arms, something that thrashed weakly and then fell back into stillness. It was hard to focus on, since Harry kept expecting to see depth to it and it had none.

“How did you get that?” he asked. “What is it?”

“I captured one of the things I could feel swimming around me,” Draco said simply, and then looked down at the blue-blackness as if even he was puzzled or dazed by it. “And I think it’s one of the dead.”

*

Draco didn’t think he needed to sit in the tent where they had kept Nusquam, a mug of hot tea in his hands and a blanket thrown over his knees. He had felt far better and stronger when he came out of that second sojourn in the darkness than he had the first time. He hadn’t forgotten heat or sunlight. And he wanted to see what Portillo Lopez and Gregory could do with the dead spirit or thing he had captured.

But Harry had insisted, and from the way he had trouble keeping his hands off Draco’s shoulders, Draco knew that it would save time to give in and do as he wanted. So he sat down, and sighed, and rolled his eyes to an invisible audience when none of the real one was looking, and settled for watching Gregory and Portillo Lopez through the gap in the flap of the tent.

They had laid the blue-blackness on the ground and were casting a mirrored shield of some sort over it. Draco could occasionally hear Gregory’s questions, most of them concerning the thing’s nature. Portillo Lopez answered only once or twice, her brow wrinkled and her wand in constant motion.

“I thought I’d lost you.”

Harry insisted on kneeling in front of him and blocking his view. Draco smiled at him temperately and remembered how he had felt two days ago when Harry had brought him out of the blackness. This time, he hadn’t been afraid of getting lost forever, and he thought it reasonable to be less affected, although Harry wasn’t.

“You didn’t,” Draco said, and patted his hand. “Don’t you think it’s an achievement, though, bringing that spirit out of Nihil’s realm? It might even be one that Nihil enslaved himself, or at least that he knew how to use.”

“It’s remarkable,” Harry said, and Draco felt a flood of warmth more persistent than anything the tea could give him. “It wouldn’t have been worth your life, though.”

Draco sighed and shifted in place. “But if I’d died there, then that thing wouldn’t have come with me out of the darkness, either,” he said. “So it’s not a case of choosing one over the other. One depends on the other. You could have died as easily if I did, and that would mean more to the world, losing you, than losing me would.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to me,” Harry answered stubbornly. “We’re talking about emotional reasons, not logical reasons.”

Draco hesitated, then let his hand rest on Harry’s shoulder so that he could press down. “I appreciate that,” he said softly. “I’ll think more about it in the future. If we go on hunting expeditions for Nihil’s people, then we should be able to make sure that we survive them. And there are other things I’d like to do than die heroically in the pursuit of new knowledge.”

“No kidding,” Harry muttered. “I brought us back because I held onto the memories of you talking to me and having sex with me. I’d like to do a lot more of that.” He looked up at Draco, and his eyes were luminous.

Draco smiled helplessly and reached down to touch the side of his face. “I have to admit that I would, too,” he muttered.

A loud bang sounded from outside the tent, rather as though someone had speared a balloon full of air that had exploded. Draco jerked back and turned to look. He saw Portillo Lopez rising to her feet, waving her wand hastily back and forth and chanting in frantic Latin. Gregory had leaped ten feet back on the blue-black thing’s other side and was doing the same thing, though her Latin was more clipped and her incantations shorter.

The blue-black thing was bleeding on the ground—if you could call emitting a colorless liquid and a foul smell bleeding. Draco stared as it lost its shape, and then set aside the cup of tea and surged to his feet.

“I’d like you to stay away from that,” Harry said mildly.

Draco wasn’t fooled by the mildness, but he also had no time for it. “I can’t,” he said and bolted out of the tent, his wand drawn and his mind bristling with memories of Nihil again. If he had to, he would step back into the dark realm with the creature and see if being there would heal it.

Harry cursed and followed him. Draco didn’t bother looking around. He was welcome in any attempt to contain or tame the creature’s blood, assuming it was as harmful as Portillo Lopez and Gregory thought it was. If he tried to grab Draco and drag him out of danger’s way, then Draco would cast a Body-Bind on him and take his wand and that would be the end of that for a while.

Unfortunately, by the time he arrived, the excitement was over. Gregory had gathered up the smell and the liquid together in a glass globe that looked like a Muggle light. Portillo Lopez was calmly chopping up pieces of the blue-blackness and laying them out like pieces of fish.

“What happened?” Draco demanded.

Portillo Lopez looked up. “This is not a spirit of the dead,” she said calmly, but with an undertone of excitement that made Harry press heavily against Draco’s back. “It is part of the darkness itself. We disrupted its integrity when we tried to carve it up. Now we have the trick of it, and we are spared an outburst from death into our world.” She smiled. “We may even have to thank the imbalance of the forces of life and death for the fact that you were able to bring this into our world in the first place.”

“What are you doing?” Harry asked. Draco relaxed. Harry had stopped thinking exclusively about Draco’s safety if he could ask that question.

“Making a weapon out of it,” Portillo Lopez said, as if genuinely surprised at the question, and returned to her chopping.

Draco experienced a rush of pure bliss. They might not yet have torture techniques that worked reliably against Nihil, but he had helped in the development of their first weapon.