Chapter Thirteen of 'Seasons of War'- Draco Thinks On His Feet

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Twelve.

Title: Seasons of War (13/?)
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 Thirteen—Draco Thinks On His Feet

“Trainee Malfoy. I am glad you could join us.”

Draco ducked through the flap of the tent and nodded to Robards, while he cast his eyes around the interior of the tent in a quick circle to see who else was there. Only Robards, though, sat at the table, and if there was anyone in the corners under a Disillusionment Charm, Invisibility Cloak, or the like, they were too skilled for Draco’s swift check to spot them.

Portillo Lopez’s words from a month ago, as they labored on the weapon, came back to him. We must assume that there is a limit to Nihil’s power, or we might as well lie down and give up now. If he is omnipotent, after all, there is no way to fight him, no matter how many clever weapons or policies we come up with.

Draco decided to assume the same thing now, that there were no hidden observers. If there were all sorts of them, critically judging him, then he wouldn’t be able to please them anyway.

He focused his attention on Robards and said, “Auror Holder said you had uncovered evidence that my partner was plotting against you, sir. What kind of evidence is it?”

Robards gave him a small smile. Draco tried to convince himself that the smile wasn’t especially mean just because it was him. He wasn’t very successful in that surmise, especially when Robards shook his head and said, “Never mind about the evidence. You need only know that it is conclusive. Now. What are your recommendations?”

Draco clasped his hands behind his back and braced himself. It was a defensive stance, but it had the advantage of not looking like one. “I can’t give specific recommendations without knowing what Harry, specifically, has done,” he said quietly.

Robards exchanged a glance with Holder. Since Holder was standing behind him and Draco didn’t want to turn to see her face, he didn’t know what her expression looked like, but he could guess. She was probably telling Robards with her eyes that he was guilty, just like Harry, and his refusal to turn against Harry at once was proof of that.

Draco bit his tongue, hard enough that the shiver of pain ran through most of his body. He needed to stop thinking like that. He needed to stop acting as though there was no way out of this trap and simply act.

“It doesn’t matter, I told you,” Robards said, turning back to Draco. His voice snapped now, and Draco took that as a good sign. Perhaps they’d expected him to break down, and didn’t know what to do with him now that he hadn’t. “All you need know is that we’ve reached the point where Potter has to be exiled or killed.”

Exiled or killed. The words nearly made Draco panic. Was it that bad? He knew Harry hadn’t done anything that bad consciously, but someone must have seized one of his actions and made it convincing enough for Robards and Holder—

And then Draco stopped himself with a jerk. These were Robards and Holder. They’d been trying to find a way to prove that he and Harry were traitors since they’d come to camp. There was no reason to act as though he would be able to rescue Harry if he was only a little bit smarter or a little bit faster.

“The oath that you had us swear,” he said. “Does it prevent someone from defecting to Nihil or not? I have to assume it doesn’t, if Harry managed to break it and become a traitor anyway. How do you know that other people in the camp aren’t becoming traitors right now, as we speak? Perhaps it would be for the best to punish them all at once?”

Robards’s features became stone. “He has not broken the oath,” he said, sounding as if the words had been forced out of him by a large rock. “It’s nothing like that. But he has committed a crime that we must deal with.”

Draco raised his eyebrows. “If you could give me even the barest outlines, sir, it would be more information than I possess right now, and that would mean that I could help you better.”

Robards cleared his throat. “Trainee Malfoy, you are being nearly as stubborn as Trainee Potter. One might assume that you know of his crime and are determined to conceal it from us and join him in death or exile.”

Draco narrowed his eyes. He had not completely lost his patience, but it might be as well to imply that he had. “It sounds as though I’ll end up being condemned to it anyway, since I don’t know what the right words to speak are. Are you going to give me any hints, sir, or just allow me to stumble about like a blindfolded man on a cliff path? Are you going to laugh when I fall?”

Robards leaned back in his chair and regarded him with the same cool expression that he had worn so far. Draco didn’t think he was playing by the script that Robards and Holder had expected him to take, though. Perhaps they really had thought he would break down and, sobbing, promise them whatever they wanted if they didn’t hurt Harry.

“You must realize,” Holder said from behind him, in a sudden voice that Draco was sure she meant to make him jump, “that your partner has been withholding information from us, and manipulating us in an attempt to make us respond to his desires. Do you plan to join him in the same actions?”

Draco twisted his head back to look at her now. She had an expression on her face so cold and stern that Draco had no idea if she really believed what she was saying or not. “No,” he said. “Then again, I had thought we were forgiven when we told you that we had hidden information in the past. Was the forgiveness a sham? Are we going to be punished now for crimes that you said we would receive no punishment for as long as we told you the truth?”

Holder lifted her wand and touched it lightly to the back of Draco’s neck. Draco stood still and felt his sweat collect on the smooth wood. “Mr. Malfoy,” Holder whispered, “you will work with us or against us, but working with us means doing as you’re told. Do you understand?”

Draco inclined his head in a parody of respect, but in reality, he was light-headed from relief. He at last thought he understood what they were doing. He and Harry, with their compatible magic and their knowledge of Nihil and Harry’s strange half-necromancy, were too valuable to destroy, but also too valuable to leave running around free. Robards and Holder were trying to make sure that neither Draco nor Harry would turn against them and leave them scrambling, or act as independent agents, because that would also mean they’d lost control.

That was fine. Draco knew how to handle that. He wouldn’t have known how to handle someone fanatical enough to really kill him and Harry for their imagined sins, because he would have no idea what code they were operating by.

“If you’ll tell us what to do instead of dropping all these hints,” he said, “then of course we’ll be happy to work with you, Auror.”

Holder paused, and her wand vanished from the back of his neck. When she walked around in front of him, Draco saw her narrowed, calculating eyes. He gazed back in a parody of innocence, his eyes so wide that Holder finally shook her head and turned away, one hand spread as though she was discarding something she had thought valuable.

“You must run all your plans past us,” she said abruptly. “You must tell us what you intend to do, what you learn about Nihil, and what you learn about his new abilities or about dissent among the trainees.”

We’re to be your spies, Draco translated that, but oddly enough, he didn’t mind. After all, he would hardly share everything they’d learned, and Robards and Holder wouldn’t know that it was partial information, if Draco lied the right way.

Draco did think that he would have to be the one to handle this part of it. Harry wasn’t a good enough liar, Granger and Herricks would stammer and blush and make it obvious they were breaking the rules, Weasley would probably give up, and Ventus simply didn’t see the need to lie when, as she saw it, they were right and going to win anyway.

“What if something we have to tell you impacts another Auror?” he asked, as though that was his only possible concern.

Robards and Holder exchanged glances. Draco couldn’t read a tenth of the information that flowed along that conduit, and had a brief glimpse of the partnership that must have endured between Holder and Robards for years, and of the reasons why they trusted each other so much.

It didn’t stop him from wishing that they were both dead, of course.

“Bring the information to us first, in that case,” said Robards, with a grand nod that Draco thought was meant to impress him. “And we will decide how to discipline the Auror appropriately. You are not to go against your superiors, Trainee Malfoy, however much you might be tempted to do so. We brought you here to cure you of that habit.”

They’ve admitted, then, that they never had any evidence that Harry had conspired against them. Draco wished he could risk a sneer. Robards and Holder might be strong, but they didn’t seem to understand much but brute force. There was no attempt to keep their plans from the comprehension of someone who would hate being a victim.

“Very well,” said Draco. “What means shall we set up so that Harry and I can contact you with the information we discover?”

Holder gave him a humorless smile. “What makes you think that you will be allowed to tell Trainee Potter what you are doing?”

“What makes you think that he’ll react to me with anything but hostility if I lie to him and he finds out?’ Draco countered. “Then he would break away from me, and you would lose the benefit of his eyes as well as mine. He would warn his friends against me, and any plans they made would be kept secret from me from then on. It’s much better if I bring him in and get him to agree.”

Not that Harry would, of course. But Draco thought that particular concept was beyond the grasp of this pair.

“Very well,” Robards said, sounding as if he were speaking through rocks. “We grant you permission to share what you are doing with him. But no one else, mind. There will be consequences if we discover that you have.”

Draco inclined his head.

After that, there were only a few more formalities to be got through before they gave up and let him out of the tent. Draco strode away from the tent with his head held high. There was nothing unusual in that, nothing that would attract the attention of anyone around him. He could ignore the speculative glances that came his way anyway, because he knew they were linked to him emerging from Robards’s tent. They might wonder what he had been doing there, but there was no way they could prove any of it.

As he went, he considered whether there had been any evidence that Harry was “plotting” in the first place, or whether that had been a pure lie designed to make him cooperate. He thought it was a lie. If the evidence had been real, they would not only have had a stronger threat to hold over Draco, but he thought that they wouldn’t have been able to resist at least alluding to it. He would then probably guess what they held and, if it was really damaging, obey them all the more readily. There was no reason for them to say nothing unless the evidence didn’t exist.

Draco smiled grimly. Strange, to think that he had once escaped the environment he’d lived in before and during the war by coming into the Aurors. He had imagined that everyone would be open, honest, and working towards the same goals. He had worried about how he would fit into that kind of environment, rather than the one that actually existed.

And maybe Robards and Holder were like that with the other trainees and Aurors. But since they distrusted Harry and Draco so much, it didn’t matter. Draco had to live with the attitude they gave him, not the hypothetical attitude they might have used if he wasn’t a former Death Eater and Harry Potter’s partner.

*

“I’m growing worried about you, Trainee Potter.”

Harry glanced up. He was breathing so hard—Ketchum had been chasing him around the hills and using stones and small shrubs that Harry wouldn’t have thought could be obstacles as obstacles—that he couldn’t get his voice back to reply for a long moment. Ketchum seemed to understand and sat down beside him on the grass, staring into the camp. Then he twisted his head around and considered the sentries on the further hills.

“Why, sir?” Harry asked finally. “I just think that I don’t listen very well and do better when I have a practical lesson in front of me. I did well now, didn’t I?” He sounded defensive and hated it. That was the way he had sounded when the Dursleys were yelling at him for not doing his chores perfectly.

“Hmmm?” Ketchum turned around. “Oh. I didn’t mean that. You’ll catch up in my class with a bit of practice, and I haven’t heard awful things about you from the other instructors. But you’re continually in conflict with the Head Auror and his She-Wolf.”

“She-Wolf?” Harry repeated. He hadn’t heard anyone use the name so far, though he knew who it meant as once.

Ketchum grinned and nodded. “I wondered if you knew why they were going after you. Anger that you withheld information in the past? Which wasn’t the smartest thing to do, by the way,” he added in cooler tones. “Or did you do something since you came into the camp to anger them specifically?”

Harry buried his head in his arms as he thought a moment. He didn’t think he should admit anything private to Ketchum. He could still be a spy for Holder and Robards. And Draco might say that they couldn’t trust Ketchum at all.

But this sounded an awful lot, to Harry, like someone making an offer of alliance, if they would take it. And it would be nice to have one older Auror who would stick up for them, since most of them didn’t want to listen to trainees.

Harry took a deep breath and looked up. “Mostly I think it’s withholding information,” he admitted. “But it’s also our power.”

“Hmmm?” Ketchum asked again. He bent nearer, his dark face creased with concentration. Harry looked at him for a minute more in silence, then shrugged. He’d already crossed the line by mentioning this at all. If it was wrong, then he and Draco would find a way to make it right later.

“Well,” Harry said, “we have compatible magic. Draco has his name and the power of that walking around with him, as well as what he did during the war. There’s what I did during the war. There’s the way that we’ve fought Nihil multiple times and survived where no one else did. And we’ve been partners for more than a year now. So, together, we scare them. I think that’s why they’ve been trying to control us or turn us against each other since we arrived here. They have to control the power we represent.”

Ketchum remained quiet this time for some moments, rubbing his chin. Harry winced. Had he said the wrong thing after all?

Hermione had asked him once why he didn’t try making inspirational speeches, because people would listen to the hero who had destroyed Voldemort. This was exactly why. Harry never knew if he was going to say the right thing before he said it, and then he worried about whether it was wrong after he spoke.

“I think you’re right,” Ketchum said.

Harry knew his jaw was sagging and that Draco would probably scold him for looking stupid, but that was how he felt at the moment. An Auror was agreeing with him instead of violently disagreeing and suggesting that he was a dumb little trainee and needed to learn more before he said anything?

“But—why?” he asked at last, weakly enough that Ketchum gave him a sideways, exasperated look.

“Aurors aren’t incapable of recognizing common sense when it’s hitting them in the face,” Ketchum said dryly. “Yes, I think that Robards and Holder fear you. Yes, I think that they feel that, if they can’t control you, someone else will, because they don’t trust you to do it yourself. The thought of trusting you doesn’t occur to them.” He leaned nearer, his voice so low that Harry thought someone standing right behind them wouldn’t be able to hear it—which was the point, he reckoned. “Well, I can tell you there are some Aurors who are getting tired of Robards and Holder spending more time trying to crush you than fighting Nihil.”

Harry stared at him. Ketchum gave him a solemn wink, a nod, and then stood up and walked towards the edge of the hill.

“Wait!” Harry said, scrambling after him. “If that’s true, why haven’t I heard about it before now? Why haven’t we heard about it?” He could see how hints might pass unnoticed in front of him, but Draco or Hermione should have picked up on them. “And why haven’t you done something before?”

Ketchum glanced back at him with a smile. “Because Aurors are stubborn and contentious, and not all of us trust you either,” he said simply. “It’s taking a while to wear down the ones who are tired of Robards and Holder but also want to just ignore you and fight Nihil by ourselves. But it’s working.”

Then he walked on as if deaf, and nothing Harry could say or shout would distract him.

*

“That bitch.”

Draco smiled. He had told Harry about what Holder did when she was trying to make Draco turn against him, and Harry had immediately got angry. It was nice to have someone who agreed with his estimate of the situation.

“Do you think she’s rational?” Harry was pacing back and forth in the center of their tent, his hand scraping through his hair. “I mean, does she see things that she could identify as treasonous and decide that they are? Or do you think that she just makes things up out of thin air, with no justification? I think she’s hard to fight either way, but the first way might be harder.”

“She’s rational,” Draco murmured, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. His mind still whirled with the possibilities of coming up with a plan that would defeat Holder, but a large part of him was also occupied with analyzing the meeting, now that Harry was there to talk about it with and while it was still fresh in his memory. “She wouldn’t have understood what I was talking about so fast and been able to come up with the plan to make us spy for her if she wasn’t. She was willing to abandon her suspicions about us when she saw that she could do so with an advantage.”

“Well, when she thought she could do so with an advantage.” Harry came to a halt in front of his chair. “Should we tell the rest of the comitatus?”

Draco opened one lazy eye. “Tell me that that would be a good idea, when we have several people who would be inclined to confront Holder just on principle.”

Harry grimaced. “No, I suppose it wouldn’t.” He turned away and prowled in a restless circle, again touching his hair. “But I don’t know how we can keep frequent visits to Holder and Robards from them.”

“We visit the command tent during times when we know that the rest are working on being better partners,” Draco said. “Lowell and Weston have already said that we don’t need to attend those practices.”

Harry stopped walking at once and smiled at him. “You think of everything.”

Draco smiled modestly back. “I try.”

Harry snorted and pushed against his shoulder as he walked back, past Draco’s chair. “What do you think about Ketchum’s claim that some of the Aurors are willing to turn against Robards and Holder? Do you think that they would be valuable allies? Could they even be persuaded to work with us? Maybe Ketchum would be willing to treat us like adults, but that says nothing about the rest of them.”

“There was the Fellowship,” Draco pointed out, to see what Harry would say to that.

Harry snorted again. “What did the Fellowship accomplish? A few meetings and a lot of chatter, and a few protections against Nihil that turned out not to matter because Dearborn was part of the group the entire time.” He flung himself down in the chair across from Draco and put his hands in his robe pockets. “I don’t think we can use the Fellowship as a model. We would have to work together as part of a fighting group, something like a bigger comitatus, rather than a Gobstones club.”

Draco smiled. That was another speech Harry never would have made a year ago. It was nice to see that Draco was having an effect on him. “Holder and Robards would be frightened at the thought of us working with Aurors that way.”

“Which is why we should do it.” Harry grinned at him.

Draco did roll his eyes this time. “When we’re pretending to be their allies? We’ll have to hide it better, that’s all. And if they would work with us, I still don’t think that they would work under our leadership. Let them fight commanded by Ketchum or whoever the actual leader is, and the rest of the comitatus can fight under me.”

“Yes, they can,” Harry said. “We can.” He stood up and sauntered over to Draco’s chair, a casual smile on his face that fooled Draco not at all.

Draco arched his neck back and accepted the heated kiss, as he accepted the way Harry sank to his knees a moment later and began to unfasten his trousers. They might not have done as much towards coming up with a plan to invade the cache near London today as he had originally wanted, but they had done enough that he felt justified in accepting his reward.