Chapter Sixteen of 'Seasons of War'- Readiness to Change

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Fifteen.

Title: Seasons of War (16/?)
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 Sixteen—Readiness to Change

“He will recover.”

Draco, even as concerned about Harry as he was, wasn’t deaf to the nuance. He glanced up sharply. “You said that he’ll recover, not that he’ll be fine,” he said. “Why?”

Portillo Lopez, who was cleaning the odd steel instrument she had placed against Harry’s head to check some pulse or sign of health unknown to Draco, paused and gave him a level stare. Draco looked back, twining his fingers with Harry’s. Harry was unconscious, and had been since their hasty evacuation from the London cache and return to the camp. Draco had gone to Portillo Lopez both because she was a Battle Healer and because he thought she wouldn’t betray them. Seeing the condemnation in her eyes now, though, Draco wondered whether he wanted to hear what she would say.

She braced one hand on the bed where Harry lay and leaned forwards to look at him. “I think of ‘fine’ as a return to normal,” she said quietly. “He will not return to normal. His connection to Nihil has increased. He will have more of those visions and dreams, I am certain. His moods may alter in reaction to Nihil’s.”

Draco stared at her in horrified silence. He had never thought this might happen. He had come to think—well, that Harry couldn’t be damaged by the necromancy he practiced or whatever it was that really tied him to Nihil.

It seemed stupid, now, for him to have assumed that Harry would always be fine simply because there had been no reaction so far.

Draco cleared his throat weakly and took up Harry’s other hand. It was limp and cold in his, and Draco would have given Malfoy Manor for it to warm. “But—what does that mean, in practical terms? What can I do to help him? Is it possible that he would betray us to Nihil even though he doesn’t want to?”

Portillo Lopez remained cool and tense for some moments, and then relaxed enough to reply, “I do not think so. A stronger connection—a connection of the kind that you have with Nihil, yourself, through his catching you by his link with Nusquam—is not necessarily going to do more harm. It will change him, as I said. You may have to be more patient with him.” She pierced Draco with a look that showed she thought that would probably be impossible for him. “If Nihil could compel someone to do what he wants merely from touching his artifacts or toys, most of us would have been enslaved before this. As it was, Potter made contact with something Nihil had left behind, not with Nihil himself. Not that it was not a stupid thing to do,” she ended, with a shake of her head.

Draco swallowed. It was little good saying that he hadn’t asked Harry to do this or hadn’t known he would. He had asked Harry to do things that might have been as dangerous, might have changed him as much, or more.

“Be careful,” Portillo Lopez finished, and then turned and walked out of the tent before Draco could ask her for any more advice or make any promises. Perhaps she’d had promises like that made to her before, Draco thought as he stroked Harry’s forehead. She would never believe them if they came from necromancers that she knew would find themselves drawn back to the Dark Arts whether or not they wanted to go.

“I’m sorry,” Draco whispered to Harry. He was glad that they were alone now; he had dismissed the rest of the comitatus to their tents the instant they returned. He had to consult Portillo Lopez by himself so that he could make the decision as to how much to tell them. He didn’t want them too discouraged.

But by himself…

Draco could feel the sting of tears around his eyes. He shut them, but it did no good. The tears were still there, and they would leak out. He took a deep breath and shivered, and then reached out and put a hand in the middle of Harry’s chest. His skin was cool and waxy everywhere on his body, not just on his hands, but his heartbeat was strong, and Draco stood listening to it until he thought he had himself under control.

Then he whispered, “Never again. I’m not going to ask you to do anything like that again, and I don’t want you to take the risks. That’s why we have the comitatus now. Granger can research less risky alternatives, and Herricks and Ventus can handle threats that would cripple the rest of us. Weasley…”

Even in the generous plans he was making at that moment to spare Harry, Draco couldn’t really find a use for Weasley. He hesitated, then shrugged and decided that he would simply have to do it later.

“We’ll keep each other safe,” Draco said. “You came into the darkness after me, twice. That was in the case of a risk I took, and if you felt one quarter the desperation to keep me safe that I feel for you now, I can’t blame you. But otherwise—no. It’s not happening again.”

Draco knew he would have a hard struggle, against the instincts that seemed to urge Harry to become a martyr on the spur of the moment as well as with the other members of the comitatus, who would have different ideas about keeping Harry safe. But he didn’t care how hard the work was. He would perform it. He had been willing to do no less to secure his freedom, defy his father, and win power.

And Harry was the most important thing in his life. Perhaps he could not have admitted that in front of anyone else, but here they were, alone, and here it was, as bright in his mind as a murder weapon.

*

Harry woke slowly. It felt as though someone was holding him down with heavy bonds, not wanting him to wake up. But he had struggled against bonds like that before, against weights like that before. He floated to the surface and hovered there, blinking.

He found himself on the bed in his and Draco’s tent, which he had to admit was an improvement over the cold stone of the cavern he had expected to find. Draco was curled up behind him, chest pressed against Harry’s back and his arms locked possessively around his waist. Harry closed his eyes and touched Draco’s wrist for a second.

Then he started trying to get up, because, as nice as Draco’s gestures might have been, he had to go to the loo.

The movement woke Draco, of course, though Harry hadn’t intended it to. Draco pressed his lips against the back of Harry’s neck and kept them there as he murmured a greeting. Harry turned around and kissed him, then renewed the struggle to get up.

“Not yet,” Draco whispered. “Don’t leave me yet.”

Harry paused and gave him a wondering glance. “I’m not going to leave you,” he said, puzzled as to why Draco had used that word. “I only have to empty my bladder, which I presume you wouldn’t want me to do in front of you.”

“No,” Draco said, but the word was tinged with reluctance. He rolled away, arms lifting last of all, and Harry made his escape.

When he came back, Draco was sitting up in bed, clothed only from the waist down and watching Harry with a devouring hunger that made Harry flush self-consciously. He gestured to a little tray nearby with soup on it, kept warm by charms, along with cheese and a piece of toast. Harry nodded his thanks and started eating.

Draco remained still, staring at him instead of telling him what had happened, and at last Harry decided that he would have to speak. “Well?” he asked, around a mouthful of bread. “We must have got out of the cache all right, but other than that, I don’t know anything. What happened after I fainted?”

Draco closed his eyes as if he would have to recall a complicated series of movements, but his voice was precise, the details bare. “Your fainting scared the shit out of all of us. We left the cache, after replacing the stone wall with a glamour. When we got back, you wouldn’t wake up and were barely breathing. I contacted Portillo Lopez. She said that from now on, you’ll have more nightmares and visions, and your moods might change to reflect Nihil’s.”

Harry stared at him, aware that his open mouth was full of half-chewed food and not really caring. Only when Draco gestured for him to shut his jaws did he remember, and then he closed them convulsively and swallowed the same way. “I don’t understand,” he whispered. “I didn’t touch Nihil’s mind directly. And the memories were the memories of the ball of nothingness, not his.”

“But they were still memories of Nihil, even if they didn’t belong to him.” Draco leaned forwards. “I heard you scream when you were looking at them. You suffered pain from them, whether or not you think you should have. I don’t want you doing anything like that again.”

Harry sat up, but he waited until he finished the soup before he responded. This was an argument he and Draco had had before, and he knew it wouldn’t be easily resolved. But it was also an argument that Draco had used before without understanding how it went against Harry’s instincts. Harry would simply have to remind him that he didn’t usually plan to hurt himself; it was simply the result of instinct and opportunity, and he would do it again because he didn’t plan, and he didn’t know who might need his help in the future.

“Anything like that again?” he asked. “What would that be? Helping you find out the truth about Nihil? Doing something that can fight and hurt Nihil? Something risky? You know that you can’t hold me back from that, Draco, and I’m surprised you would try.”

Draco closed his eyes and massaged his temples with one hand. Harry ordinarily would have apologized and moved to try and soothe the forming headache, but in this case, he could only do that by making a promise that went against his whole nature. So he remained silently and obstinately in place, and Draco opened his eyes with a groan and made another plea.

“I want to keep the rest of us safe too, Harry. It’s not a prohibition that only affects you. We should use the strengths of the comitatus, the way we did in the first part of the raid on the cache. Herricks and Ventus came along to help keep us safe, and they might have been able to do it this time, too. We could have learned a lot from Pensieve memories of the footprints in the rock. There was no need for you to use your connection to Nihil and necromancy that way.”

Harry shook his head. Draco still didn’t see. “But I didn’t deliberately set out to do that,” he said. “We never would have found that chamber in the rock in the first place if not for my connection. That’s not something anyone else in the comitatus could have done, finding it.”

“And the investigation into the ball of nothingness?” Draco asked evenly. “Do you think that’s something only you could have done? That there was no less risky way to find out what we needed to know?”

“It wouldn’t have been information that was as complete,” Harry said triumphantly. “Would we know about Nemo with any other method?”

“But, just as you don’t deliberately set out to endanger your life, you didn’t deliberately set out to discover that,” Draco said swiftly. “You didn’t know if the information would be worth when you performed that spell. It might have been even more valuable than what you did find. It might have been worthless. That’s why I want you to stop taking risks, Harry. Because you gamble something that we do know is valuable—your life—for the sake of a gain that might not be.”

“I haven’t failed to gain something valuable yet,” Harry retorted, more stung than he would admit by that tactic. It seemed unfair to him that Draco was going to turn his way of arguing around on him. “Whether it’s information that we can use immediately or facts that we can put together later.”

“But someday you will,” Draco said quietly. “Someday you’ll die. And we can’t keep fighting Nihil this way, with these little jerks of wit and insight and brilliant intuition that cost you so much. Leave something for the rest of the comitatus to do, Harry. Let others help you. That’s the hardest lesson you’ll ever have to learn.”

“What about your hardest lesson?” Harry snapped. He felt that Draco was right, and he didn’t want to feel that way, because he also felt that he had to take risks. That was the only skill he had that the others didn’t, the ability to take risks and survive them. “You were the one who reached out to the darkness the day we made the weapon, and that turned out to be a brilliant idea, too.”

“My hardest lesson is learning how much I love you, and how much it would destroy me if anything happened to you.”

Harry turned his head aside. Draco promptly moved so that they were still face-to-face. He didn’t try to touch Harry or force him to look, but sat there, eyes so bright that Harry couldn’t bear to look away.

Harry swallowed. He hadn’t thought, again, about what might happen to the people he left behind if he died during one of those charges into the darkness. His vague idea was always that the lives saved or the information gained would be worth it, that his death didn’t have to mean the end of the war or the fight or someone else’s life.

And for Ron and Hermione, who had each other now, and Ventus and Herricks, who weren’t precisely close to him, it could be survivable. But Draco?

“I would rather give up my inheritance than you,” Draco whispered. “I would rather give up Malfoy Manor. I would rather give up my life. Does all of that tell you how important you are to me? Are you convinced?”

Harry nodded against his will. “But what about the risks that everyone else takes?” he demanded. “How can we fight a war that we have to fight defensively?”

“We only had to do that as long as we didn’t know what was preoccupying Nihil,” Draco said calmly. “Now we do.”

“What?” Harry raised his eyebrows. “I discovered how he was getting the balls of nothingness out, yeah, but not why he hasn’t attacked us in the past few months.”

“It’s perfectly obvious,” Draco said, with a return of the superciliousness that Harry knew so well. “He’s been busy creating these balls of nothingness. We should have remembered that his ultimate goal is to destroy the world so that he doesn’t have to remember his pain, not to punish us or destroy the Aurors. He’ll create them and create them until he has enough to make the world—collapse, or consume itself, or whatever the consequences are of bringing that much nothingness across.”

Harry did feel stupid for not seeing it before, when it was phrased that way. “All right,” he said. “But let’s say that we do manage to destroy Nemo and keep him from bringing more balls of nothingness into the world. What then? I just don’t think that we’ll defeat him, and we might not know enough to oppose whatever tactic he comes up with next.”

*

Draco sighed. Harry would do anything, it seemed, to keep risking his life, and he hadn’t reacted to Draco’s confession of love and desire the way Draco had hoped he would.

But then he reminded himself that Harry was struggling against deeply-ingrained instincts, instincts that he had to fight even harder because so many times they had worked and won him whatever he was going after. And he had survived so far, so it was hard for him to imagine a time when he wouldn’t.

“We’ll work with the rest of the comitatus, of course,” Draco said quietly. “And maybe with this group of Aurors that Ketchum was telling us he represents, always assuming that he was telling the truth. It’s enough to hold Nihil at bay. We’ll find out what else he’s trying to do and keep him from doing it.”

Harry gnawed his lip and looked stubborn.

“We have resources that we haven’t called on yet,” Draco said. “This group of Aurors. Our compatible magic—Weston and Lowell have hinted that it can do marvelous things, and we’ve barely explored them. Portillo Lopez’s Order, which must know more than she does by herself. We can do this, Harry, without jumping into danger every time danger comes along.”

“I don’t do that on purpose,” Harry insisted. “I don’t plan it.”

Since it seemed important to him that Draco acknowledge that, Draco did tilt his head in acknowledgment. “Yes, I know,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter when the result is so often the same, Harry. You get what you’re going after, but you come back injured. If the war effort against Nihil matters so much to you, you ought to want to survive it, and not connect yourself to him or change yourself in ways that would render you unable to participate.”

Harry lowered his eyes. Draco waited patiently through the silent struggle that seemed to take place, and finally Harry made a frustrated noise and looked back at him.

“What if this is the only way I can participate?” he whispered. “What if there’s no other way I can contribute to the war effort? It’s the result of everything I’ve done so far. I took up necromancy impulsively, and it was useful. I risked my life dashing to Hagrid’s assistance, and we learned more about Nemo’s beasts. I went after you into the darkness without realizing what I was doing, and I rescued you and we learned how to make the weapons. What else can I do?”

“Is this war your whole life?” Draco asked.

Harry stared at him, and then asked, as if he thought it was a trick question, “No?”

“It isn’t,” Draco said. “Your life is also mine, and your friends’, and the comitatus, and becoming an Auror. You can do other things, Harry. I’m only asking that you not simply charge in and risk your life the way you did anymore. If you have a wonderful idea, discuss it with someone else first. Please.”

“Because I came so close to dying this time?” Harry had a thick line between his brows that Draco knew he would have to address sooner or later.

“Because I’ve realized what would happen to me if I lost you,” Draco said, and then waited.

Harry stared at his hands, at the tent flap, at the bed’s headboard. Then he swallowed and reached out. Draco’s hand was already waiting for his, and he held on tight, although it was hard enough to make Harry wince. He needed to feel the bone and the tendon and the flesh and know that Harry was alive.

“I’m sorry,” Harry whispered. “I honestly had no idea that I was hurting you so much. I’ll try to discuss my ideas with you first, but I might not always succeed. It’s not something I’m used to.”

“An effort will be enough for me,” Draco said. “And that way, you can get used to it slowly. Over time, the effort will become more of a habit, and we can learn together. Do you want to do that?”

Harry turned Draco’s hand over and kissed the palm.

Draco wasn’t sure what it was about that gesture which made him react so strongly, but the next time he really drew breath, he was pressing Harry back into the chair and kissing him so fiercely that Harry made small gagging noises. Draco let him go, but only long enough to let Harry breathe and to move him from the chair to the bed.

He tried to be careful, because of what Portillo Lopez had said about possible damage to Harry from Nihil, but it was difficult. And Harry didn’t seem to need carefulness. He kicked at Draco with strong, lithe legs, and his gagging noises changed to hisses of protest whenever Draco drew away, and his arms embraced Draco and wouldn’t let him put more than a few inches between them.

He was all muscle and warmth and existence, and Draco had no qualms about being held so tightly when he thought that. He had nearly lost this, as well as all the other aspects of Harry. They might have gone down to darkness and then vanished.

He made Harry come with light kisses to his cock and then a few sucking ones that were as strong as the ones he’d used on his mouth. Harry shuddered and clung to him, head tilted back, face full of the drowning expression that Draco knew he had worn when Harry was still unconscious.

He had agreed. He would try to restrain his impulsiveness. He understood how important he was to Draco.

Draco spent himself inside Harry’s body, rocking more to the stuttering rhythms of Harry’s breath and the surprised cries that emerged from his mouth than to the urgency of his own orgasm. When he pulled out, Harry rolled over, embraced him, and sought his mouth. Draco was more than happy to kiss him, but Harry pulled away and moved his mouth up to Draco’s ear.

Draco tensed in anticipation of some delicious biting, but Harry did something different. He began to whisper.

“I love you, too. I love you so much that I couldn’t think about it before I leaped after you into the darkness, because there was no choice. When I see you in danger, all the rational preconceptions and ideas melt away. I need to save you, and that’s all there is to it. I love you more than my own safety, my own life.”

Draco closed his eyes. In some ways the message behind Harry’s words was disturbing, but it did mean that he had a return in his desperately offered words, a return and more than a return. Harry cared more about Draco than anyone else, he must, or he would have hesitated at least a little.

Instead, he leaped, and as little as he liked the risks that came along with that, Draco could accept the tribute. He was learning to understand Harry better, he thought, and to see the good in the most risky things that he did.

“I love you more than the thought of winning the war,” Harry whispered. “But I want to because I know that the war might destroy you, and I couldn’t bear that. I want to make the world safe for you. I love you more than the thought of keeping myself fresh to do something other than win the war. I love you more than the thought of keeping my blood in my veins or becoming an Auror.”

Draco shivered and lay closer, and let the delicious whispering continue, and he was recompensed over and over for the risks he himself had run, tying his heart to someone who had once been his enemy and who might die and leave him alone.