lomonaaeren

Chapter Ten.

Title: Seasons of War (11/?)
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 Eleven—The Comitatus In Spring

“This is the first prototype of our new weapon.”

Draco kept his eyes fixed firmly forwards, so that he couldn’t look around and embarrass himself by seeking out the expressions on people’s faces. Most of them were likely hopeful, anyway, without the admiration or wonder that would have fed his ego.

“Look at it carefully,” Holder went on, pacing in front of their ranks. She held up the blue-black, compact thing—it was so shiny that it was hard to make out its shape, but it looked like the butt of a whip to Draco—and then tossed it into the air. A few people cried out anxiously, but Holder caught the weapon and looked at them with a smug smile.

She did that on purpose, Draco thought, his heart still hammering with the belief that the weapon he’d helped to create would be destroyed. Bitch.

Holder held the thing out towards them. Draco squinted. It was still hard to focus his eyes on it even though he knew what he was looking for, and he could hear similar discontented murmurs from the others.

“Each partnership will be given one to wield,” Holder said, and her voice was deadly serious now. Her eyes bored into Draco and Harry as if she thought they would be the ones to disregard her instructions and kill themselves. Draco put his chin up and wondered how much she knew of the part they’d played in the development of the weapon. Not much, likely; Portillo Lopez and Gregory had presented the weapon as their accomplishment. Draco and Harry had agreed that they should, so as to get Robards and Holder to actually listen, but it still stung. “You must use them carefully. If you lose them, they will not be replaced. Wield them only on the living dead or on the people or creatures you suspect to have been taken over by Nihil. Others will not be hurt by them, and can still hurt you with spells.”

Heads bobbed all around him; Draco could hear the rustling of hair against robe collars. He nodded with the rest. What else could he do? He understood the limitations of the weapon better than Holder did, but he was at her mercy for the present.

Harry tucked an elbow against his side. Draco smiled, and knew it was a tight smile, but he wanted to show Harry that he understood and appreciated the reassurance. He made the smile vanish when Holder glanced at him again.

“To wield the weapon,” Holder said, “you will clasp it in one hand and aim either end at the creature you wish to destroy. Or to test,” she added, with a small, mean smile that Draco thought she had used just to make other people gulp. “If you suspect that someone is a servant of Nihil, this will provide the proof that they are not. Or are.”

She turned and aimed the thing high. Draco glanced up. Two Aurors, Ketchum and Jones, were dragging something that struggled and snarled and hissed into the middle of the clearing where the trainees stood. This was their new camp, the one they had come to with the end of winter, and the grass wasn’t completely churned into mud yet. It was enough so to make drops of it fly from the struggling creature’s feet, though.

Harry stiffened next to him. Draco glanced at him but could make nothing out of the expression on his face, so he turned back to the thing.

It had shriveled skin like a dried prune, and it lunged and snapped at its captors with oversize teeth. Otherwise, it looked normal, a boy who might have been sixteen or so, but Draco knew at once that it was one of the living dead.

A murmur of revulsion ran through the students. Holder grinned over her shoulder, clearly loving that, and then took aim with the weapon at the boy. He went still in a moment, staring at her. Or, no, Draco thought, not at her. At the weapon in her hand. His overlarge teeth clapped down again, and he looked as wary as a mouse in front of a hawk.

“Now,” Holder said, in a detached voice that made Draco’s jaws ache. “When you have the weapon aimed, you will squeeze down with both hands at once, on opposite sides. And then you must stand still. If you aim it elsewhere or wander in front of it, you may disrupt the weapon’s working and allow your prey to attack you.”

The weapon trembled and spat. The air between Holder and the living corpse turned blue-black. Draco blinked and blinked again. He kept thinking that he should be able to make out some pattern in the color, like a lightning bolt or a sheet of mist, and it kept eluding him.

There was no doubt about its effect on the living dead boy, though.

His arms flailed at the air so hard that Jones had trouble holding onto him. His mouth opened, and then kept opening. The darkness from it traveled down the front of his face and then over the back of his head and kept expanding, while his teeth ripped loose of his jaw and zipped through the air. The trainees ducked them with cries of disgust. Draco didn’t, but that was because he’d had the sense to raise a Shield Charm around himself the moment he saw the weapon take effect.

The boy’s mouth kept opening, and his dried flesh tore in front of it. Then something swirled up from the mouth, something soft and smoky and clinging like wool. Draco thought it would have felt like wool if he had put out his hand to touch it, too.

The smoky thing dived beneath the earth and faded. At the same moment, the blue-black light ceased and the body collapsed into mucky piles of skin and bone. The demonstration was done. Jones and Ketchum stepped back, both wringing their hands to remove the last bits of grey flesh. Ketchum was smiling. Jones simply looked revolted.

“That is the way to use them,” Holder went on, turning back to the trainees. “Does anyone need any more instruction?” She looked like she would be happy to provide it to anyone who asked, and Draco knew why. It would give her more chances to destroy the living dead that it seemed the Aurors had finally managed to capture, and she was happiest when she was destroying things.

Granger raised her hand and asked a question that she already knew the answer to, considering how intensively she had worked with Gregory and Portillo Lopez, as well as Harry and Draco, to produce the weapon. But Draco knew that she would say she was doing this for the sake of people too shy to ask questions if he teased her about it. “What was that smoky thing that escaped his mouth?”

“We don’t know, exactly,” Holder said. “The weapon can’t touch it. We like to think that it was his spirit fleeing control, going home, but of course we cannot be sure.”

A few people looked more revolted than before. Draco rolled his eyes. There were some who wouldn’t be contented until someone had gentled the whole world for them, wrapped all the nasty dangers in protective glass and then smoothed the paths so that they wouldn’t trip as they wandered through and gaped.

“I see,” Granger said, and fell silent, frowning heavily. It was the same objection she had raised during the weapon’s development, Draco remembered. He didn’t think she was honestly worried about hurting the spirits of the dead; she must know (at least, if she was rational, and Draco thought she was, most of the time) that being dead would hurt the spirits less than whatever Nihil had done to them while he possessed them. But she didn’t like not knowing the answers to things.

“Now,” Holder said, and raised her hand with a grand, sweeping motion that made Draco think she could have been a good actress. Better an actress than the second-in-command of the Aurors, at any rate. Weston and Lowell came forwards holding an armful each of the shiny blue-black objects. “Here are your weapons. You will both train to use them, and do nothing else, for the next two days.”

Draco sighed. He and Harry already knew how to use them, thanks to being part of the testing. That meant he would suffer a lot of boredom in the next two days.

“Look at it this way,” Harry said, in a whisper that actually managed to be a whisper instead of a half-shout. “That just means that we can spend the next few days working on something else, and Holder doesn’t have an excuse to punish us.”

Draco bit his lip to muffle his chuckle. Unfortunately, Holder turned around at that same moment and saw him.

“Did you have something to say, Trainee Malfoy?” she asked, stalking towards him with her robes flowing and snapping behind her. She could still have taken pointers on it from Professor Snape, Draco thought.

“Not as such, Auror Holder,” he said. “I was just thinking that we might have an advantage in using this weapon because we’ve been partners for a longer time than others.” It was the best excuse he could offer, since Holder and Robards were both determined not to let anyone else among the trainees know about Harry and Draco’s ability to enter Nihil’s world, or Harry’s necromancy.

Holder stared into his eyes as if she assumed that her gaze was Veritaserum. Draco looked back calmly. My father did this better, bitch.

Holder finally shrugged and turned away. “You and Trainee Potter will give the first demonstration on Wednesday,” she said over her shoulder.

Draco sneered at her back. If she thought that an opportunity to gain adulation and glory would intimidate him, then she hadn’t understood his psychology at all.

Of course, he thought understanding his psychology was low on her list of priorities, while he wanted to know more about her so that he could determine how much he should hurt her for hurting Harry.

Harry reached out a hand and accepted the blue-black weapon that Weston was handing them at that moment. Weston raised an eyebrow, whispered, “Only remember that you should not rely on this exclusively as a substitute for your compatible magic,” and was gone before Draco could retort that that was a stupid thing to think they’d do.

Harry turned the object over, and shivered. Draco reached out gingerly. He had helped a lot in the stages that this went through, yes, but he hadn’t touched the finished project, which had needed strong doses of Portillo Lopez’s magic and which she had therefore worked on alone.

The butt of the weapon was smooth and slick beneath his fingers; it was like touching wet ice. Draco shook his fingers out and drew them away. When he glanced up, he found that Harry had his head bowed and was frowning at the weapon.

“What?” Draco whispered.

“There’s this—thrumming running through it,” Harry whispered back. “I didn’t realize that would be there.”

Draco frowned and touched the weapon again. He couldn’t feel anything but silence and solidity. “Well, I don’t feel that, but what about the cold?”

“It’s not cold,” Harry said, giving him a sharp look. “It’s warm.”

Draco shivered a bit himself. Bringing weapons back from beyond death was not at all a simple thing to do, as he knew from venturing into Nihil’s realm twice more to grab pieces of the void. But he had somehow thought, without even thinking about why, that making the pieces into solid things that one could touch and hold would eliminate their strangeness.

There were unhappy murmurs all around them that said other partnerships were finding that out. Draco glanced over at Granger and Weasley. They both hovered above the weapon, which lay in Weasley’s hands, and apparently Granger was taking notes on a parchment draped across her arm.

Draco turned to Ventus and Herricks. He regarded the thing with dread, while Ventus spun it in her hands with a small smile, getting used to the weight. Draco was sure that she would be comfortable with it long before anyone else was.

Draco sighed. He knew that they would have to incorporate Herricks into the comitatus, because he was Ventus’s partner and she had worked well with him so far, and they had been trying to expose him to the information they’d accumulated and the experiences they’d had outside the structure of the Auror hierarchy. He had accepted it with horrified glances and timidity so far, as well as horrified fascination. He was more rule-bound than Granger, and prone to underplay his own talents much like Harry.

Herricks glanced up as if he could tell that Draco was thinking of him and scowled in his direction. Draco noted that he switched his attention back to Ventus and the weapon a moment later, as if he thought she shouldn’t be left alone with it.

Draco sighed again. If we want her—and we do—then we have to have him there. I can only hope that his timidity is a good thing and will make him submit to my leadership a bit more.

*

“No. Why should you be the leader? You despise the Aurors, and I’ll be astonished if you make a good one.”

Harry winced. He had thought that they might have trouble with Herricks, but not this particular kind of trouble.

Draco watched Herricks with glittering eyes. They were in the middle of Harry and Draco’s tent, which Draco had taken the chance to enlarge with wizardspace when they moved camps. There were chairs for everyone, but only Hermione was actually sitting down. Ron stood behind her chair warily, as if he assumed that he would have to defend her from something, Ventus was on her feet and facing Draco, and Herricks was on his feet with his arms folded.

“Everyone else in the comitatus has accepted me,” Draco said. “Including your partner. Don’t you trust her judgment?”

“Not always,” Herricks said.

Harry snorted, and then tried to turn it into a muffled cough when Draco scowled at him. He had to agree, though. Ventus was an excellent fighter, but she had little concern for her own safety, and she revered Draco to the point that it could hurt her sometimes.

Draco shook his head. “You can accept my leadership, or you can leave the comitatus. They have even less reason to follow someone like you, who’s new to most of them and has only worked in-depth with Ventus. You haven’t shared what we have. If you want to challenge me, you’d have to give a better reason than your being uneasy with it.”

Herricks shook his head. He hadn’t moved, and Harry thought that Draco had probably overestimated his vulnerability. “I don’t want to take the leadership myself, but I object to obeying you when you might order me to do something stupid.”

Draco closed his eyes in the way that Harry recognized as coming right before his tension headaches. He reached over Draco’s shoulder and started massaging his temples, making as many soothing noises as he could.

Draco tilted his head back so that he rubbed against Harry’s fingers, and spoke without opening his eyes. “Listen to me, Herricks. I’ll explain my decisions as much as I can. You can question them. Granger certainly does.”

“Of course I do,” Hermione muttered. “I always questioned the decisions Harry made, too. We might not be here if I hadn’t.”

Harry smiled at her. Hermione, for some reason, flushed and looked away. Ron put a hand on her shoulder to reassure her in much the same way that Harry was trying to reassure Draco. Or, at least, Harry thought it was the same. He didn’t always identify the emotions his best friends were feelings as well as he could identify Draco’s.

On the other hand, to do that, I’d probably have to sleep with them. Harry shuddered from the thought and dropped his hands as Draco opened his eyes and stepped forwards again.

“But if I say something in the midst of battle, then I want you to listen,” Draco said. “And we’ll probably be fighting plenty of battles that we won’t have time to make detailed plans for, and which the Aurors wouldn’t let us fight if they knew.”

“I don’t know why you oppose everything your comitatus does to what the ‘Aurors’ know and do and like,” Herricks said, frowning. “Aren’t you training to become Aurors yourselves? Why do you assume that you’re something different or opposite from them? You speak as if you were.”

Draco paused and frowned. Harry had to smile. He thought that Hermione would have used bigger words to make the point, but otherwise it was something she might have brought up.

“Yes, exactly!” Hermione was sitting up in her chair, cheeks on fire with emotion, eyes shining. “Why do we act as though we can’t go to the Aurors for help, or as if all of them would hate us fighting our own battles? They want people to work together. That’s why they’ve pushed together so many new partners.” She looked meaningfully at Ventus and Herricks, though Harry didn’t think either one noticed. “They would be proud and happy when we tell them that we’ve formed the comitatus. They might adopt the form to use in other situations.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” Ventus said. “I told you about the comitatus. Our primary loyalty is to each other. We can fight apart in partnerships, but we also bring new strengths into the comitatus. The Aurors would either waste a lot of time trying to make everyone into groups like ours—when they have to happen naturally—or they would assume it was bad because we were the ones who did it and force us apart.” She didn’t sound upset, Harry thought, but as if she were simply speaking a fact.

“But that would be stupid of them.” Hermione was frowning and tapping her fingers on her elbow.

“You assumed the Aurors were paragons of intelligence?” Draco raised his eyebrows. “Oh, dear, Granger.”

Hermione had the good grace to smile at that. “But we should still approach them,” she said. “Portillo Lopez and Gregory helped us with this weapon. I don’t think trying to act without them will get us anywhere.” She paused and scowled at Draco as though she had suddenly realized something. “What were you planning on doing without them, anyway? What’s the next task that you’re envisioning for the comitatus?”

Harry leaned back against the wall and watched Draco with some interest. He had to admit that he didn’t know what secrets Draco was keeping, either. He hadn’t seen fit to spill them this time.

Draco remained still, turning his head from side to side so that he could survey them all individually. Harry stayed where he was, but Draco still glanced at him for long, quiet moments. Harry became aware, when Draco turned away, that he was standing up straighter than normal and drawing in his stomach. He slumped again and scowled.

“Nihil hasn’t attacked us for months,” Draco said. “Long enough for us to assemble that weapon, enough for winter to start passing. Why? What could be more important than killing people who killed one of his people and who are developing weapons against him?”

“He might not know about the weapon,” Ron said. “How could he?”

“He has spies.” Draco flicked his fingers as though he accepted the possibility and found it not worth worrying about. “I know that. The most important thing is that he might not know of a way to counter it yet. But he’ll invent it in time.” He began pacing back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back. “But he hasn’t visibly come into camp to test it yet. Why not? What’s he doing instead? We should find out what that is and disrupt it.”

“That makes sense,” Herricks said slowly. He seemed to have forgotten to be upset about Draco being the leader. “But how can we learn what he’s doing? We can’t send any spies after him. We don’t know where he is.”

“We have the means of finding out,” Draco said, and turned to Harry.

Harry winced. He’d told Draco more about his visions of Nihil—the rare ones he’d had, anyway—in the last few days. He’d thought Draco was asking out of idle curiosity. He should have remembered that wasn’t one of Draco’s motives.

“I don’t know how to control the things I see,” he said flatly, before Draco could say anything. “And the visions I’ve had seemed to focus on Catherine Arrowshot. I haven’t had one in a long time, so she might be dead.”

“Who’s Catherine Arrowshot?” Herricks demanded. “The one who disappeared? The traitor?”

Hermione explained to him while Draco met Harry eye to eye and seemed to exude an aura of calm. Harry shook his head. “You’re not getting your way this time,” he said. “I don’t even know why I have visions. How could you expect me to use them for the good of the comitatus if I don’t know why?”

“We know more about Nihil than we did when you had the last vision,” Draco said. “I think that you can use the imbalance of the forces of life and death to take a good look at him. At least, if my theory is correct,” he added.

“What theory?” Harry folded his arms. Ron was paying close attention to them, frowning. Harry hoped that he could at least count on Ron’s support not to do this mad thing if it came to that. Ventus watched with bright eyes, which meant she would be no help, with her faith in everything Draco did.

“The theory that says that you and Nihil are connected because both of you have special connections to life and death,” Draco said. He was utterly serene, and Harry had to admit that that was calming him down, although it still wouldn’t make him do things against his will. “He’s the one who disrupted the world so much by raising armies of the living dead, and you’re the last bit of the Dark Lord remaining in the world.”

Harry blinked. “An interesting way to look at it,” he said finally.

“I’m right, though?” Draco said. Only someone who knew him as well as Harry did would have known that he was asking a question. “Portillo Lopez did say that your art of necromancy was probably there because you had a connection to the Dark Lord?”

Harry shrugged. “That wouldn’t help me all that much if I’m supposed to make the connection to Nihil. And remember that our attempts to invade his mind have never gone very well.”

“This theory that I have is based on resonance similarity,” Draco said. Harry rolled his eyes—Draco knew he didn’t do well with magical theory—and Draco hurried to explain. At least he did it better than Portillo Lopez. “When two magical objects in the world are extremely similar, they set up a conduit between themselves. Not consciously; Dark artifacts and books can do it too. They have to be more than identical copies of each other, though, so it wouldn’t work with, say, two copies of the same book. The conduit is a tunnel that results in an exchange of magic, and any magic that’s used by or on them set up sympathetic changes in the other. If you ripped out a page of one book, you might find the page with the same number in the similar book damaged. I know of a case where two magical swords both melted although both of them were only heated a bit. The fire was magical, so that made the conduit vibrate between them, and the exchange of magic went on and on, amplifying each time, until it triggered the melting process.”

“All right,” Harry said, mind reeling with images of invisible tunnels and magical vibrations stretching through space. “But how does that help with a vision, instead of damage?”

Draco smiled. “The connection between you and the Dark Lord was based on similar pieces of soul. Shape a piece of your mind so that it’s similar to Nihil’s, and I think you can get through.”

No wonder he doesn’t see anything wrong with this plan, thought Harry after a stunned moment. He’s already mental himself.