Chapter Twenty-Three of "Seasons of War'- Unacceptable Sacrifices

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Twenty-Two.

Title: Seasons of War (23/40)
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 Twenty-Three—Unacceptable Sacrifices

Someone was in pain near him.

Draco struggled towards what he knew was the surface. It heaved and roiled above him, and hands grasped his legs, trying to pull him away from it. A cold, knowing voice whispered in his ear that he would regret it when he breathed air again. Far better to stay here, within the cold, knowing darkness, and to refuse and put off the pain he would feel.

But Draco had learned courage from Harry, and he couldn’t stop using it merely because he was afraid. He pulled one more time, the hands fell away, and he broke the surface.

When he opened his eyes, he knew immediately that something was wrong, something more than the pain. Darkness pressed heavily on him. Magic sparked in the air around him, then faded, as though a barrier prevented it from touching the pain. A figure Draco could only see dimly started from the chair next to him and shouted for Portillo Lopez.

Whatever happened, they can’t share it with the rest of the Auror Healers who aren’t our allies, Draco thought, and was pleased with himself for coming to such a logical conclusion. He tried to roll his head sideways, but his brain was stuffed with cotton rags, and by the time he finished the motion, Portillo Lopez had arrived.

“Be still,” she said at once, as though Draco was resisting her advice on purpose, and peered at him. “Do you remember what happened?”

“Another attack by Nihil,” Draco said. He could put this into concrete words, he thought. He could summarize it. That kept him from remembering, too much, the hammering clutch of bony fingers on his body, or the way that Harry had fought to free them while he remained trapped behind some sort of wall. “What did it do to me?” It had to have done something nasty, more than normal, or there would be no reason for the tightness to Portillo Lopez’s mouth.

Portillo Lopez hesitated. A ragged voice whispered from behind her, “Does he have to be troubled with that now? Let him sleep.” Draco blinked in surprise when he recognized the voice as Harry’s.

Something was wrong with the blink, too. Before Draco could figure it out, though, Portillo Lopez said, “He is the one who will have to live with it. I suggest you let him begin to try,” and stepped away. When she came back, she held a mirror in her hand that she extended silently to him.

Draco stared. It was odd. The perspective was odd. The angle was odd. The light was odd. There was no other way to explain what he was seeing: the vivid scratches on his face, half-healed, and the empty socket behind the fluttering eyelid.

“No,” he said. “The hands that held us were only illusion, or metaphor. Only something that Nihil imagined. Or else they were one of Nemo’s beasts, but we’ve defeated them and escaped multiple times without injuries like this. No.” He put up his hand, hesitated, and felt at his face with cautious fingers. He would touch something in a moment, he knew, that would disprove the tale of injury he saw in the mirror.

His fingers felt the eyelid. They pressed. There was no—

There was no give beneath it, no pressure, like there should have been.

Draco licked his lips. Harry made a sound like a sick dog. Draco sat up and reached for the mirror, and Portillo Lopez surrendered it without a fight. Draco sat there and stared at himself.

He was injured. Perhaps permanently, unless Healing magic could devise a way for him to get an eye back. Draco didn’t know if it could. Some wounds were easy to fix, but then there was Mad-Eye Moody, who had lost an eye due to Dark magic. Nothing could cure it, which was why he’d had a magical eye instead.

You could get a magical eye.

The only thought in Draco’s mind for long minutes, repeating like a drumbeat, was the odd one—but then, this whole day was odd—that he didn’t want a magical eye like Moody’s because it would make him uglier than he himself could bear.

“Draco, I’m so sorry.”

Draco put out a hand mechanically, and Harry grabbed it and squeezed it as though that could reassure him. Draco shook his head. His tongue was metallic in his mouth, his head filled with memories. Strange memories, ordinary ones of the day before, but the difference was that he’d had two eyes then.

“I’m sorry,” Harry repeated, and kissed his knuckles. Draco once would have been able to see him without turning his head, by nothing more than the flicker of motion that occurred in the corner of his eye. But now he couldn’t do that. He had to cock his head and look in different ways to understand.

The walls seemed flat in new ways. The shadows were different. Draco had to wonder what this loss would cost him. Something more than it seemed it would right now, he thought, and licked his lips.

“If I could have saved you from this, I would have,” Harry was continuing in a desperate, mindless way. It was all too obvious that he had no idea about the thoughts passing through Draco’s head. “I would have taken it on myself if I could have. I’m so sorry.”

“Shut up,” Draco whispered, and Harry’s voice cut off like the wail of a smothered child. Draco studied the mirror again, and then turned and looked up at Portillo Lopez, trying to see all the expressions that might be possible in her face this time, trying to force one eye to do the work of two. “Can you heal this? It was caused by the claws of a necromantic beast, so I don’t know if you can.”

“If it is possible,” Portillo Lopez said carefully, “no one in my Order knows it.”

Draco closed his eyes—eye. He would have to get used to thinking like that, he thought. He would have to get used to a lot of things being different now.

*

Harry was half-frantic.

He’d felt that way in the past, of course, notably when there was no way for him to help someone who would probably die in the next minute. It was part of the reason he had given Draco for dashing to the rescue in hopeless circumstances. Yes, he might die, but at least he wouldn’t die of frustration.

Now, though, he’d felt the same way for hours on end. Draco hadn’t said much since he woke up with only one eye; he nodded or shook his head in response to question, but he seemed to have shut down the part of his brain that would let him take in new information. Whenever Harry tried to apologize or ask anything about what Draco was going to do in the future, he turned away and sat there with a still face until Harry gave up.

This was a new Draco. This was someone he had to help, had to care for and help recover, but so far he could see no way to do that. There was no enemy to defeat. The enemy had come and gone, and if Harry had been the major force in driving them back in the end, it hadn’t been in time to prevent the loss of Draco’s eye.

He lay in bed beside Draco that night and stared at the ceiling of the tent. Time was limited, he knew. They had been able to conceal Draco so far tonight; after all, he had no classes to attend and they could keep the secret hidden among the people who were already loyal. But they would have to come up with some reason for his lost eye by tomorrow. Portillo Lopez had begun to discuss a glamour. Then she’d looked at Draco’s face and said nothing else.

That was something he could do, Harry thought suddenly, brain fastening on the information like a starving cat on meat. He could come up with an excuse that would protect Draco, or a method that would protect Draco, and give him breathing room. He had the tools at hand. The only thing he had to find was the daring to use them.

The daring was there, in spades.

He sat up, and then sat considering for a moment. Draco had asked him to be careful if he could, and to think. Was there something else he could do? Something that didn’t involve quite as much risk, something that would help Draco without exposing Harry’s hand in it or endangering him?

The answer was quick.

No. And if I wait too long, then we’ll both be in more danger from my desire to help than we will be from my actions.

Harry smiled grimly as he rose to his feet and walked across the tent, aiming for the trunk that he and Draco concealed private things in, such as Snape’s Pensieve. No one could say that he didn’t know himself.

*

Mother. I wish you were here.

Draco swallowed and rolled over. Harry’s side of the bed was cold, but Draco had expected that. Harry had probably gone outside to stare at the stars and brood on what he could have done. Or else he was searching for a Time-Turner, to find a way to change the past.

Draco wished he wouldn’t.

But there was no way to say that without sounding stupid or heartless. Did he want to have one eye? Did he want Harry to blame himself? No, and no. And no, he wasn’t up to arguments about it right now, either. Draco simply had to shut his eyes—eye—and lie there with his heart pounding rather than yell, or move around too much. Move around, and Harry might realize he was awake and start his whispered entreaties again.

Draco knew what he wanted to hear. That Draco forgave him and knew he couldn’t have done anything. That was the truth—

Maybe. Draco didn’t know what he thought and felt about this right now. He couldn’t remember enough to know if he blamed Harry or not. The experience was drowned in flashes of pain, as well as humiliation that Harry had been the one to rescue them yet again.

Or maybe Harry would want the blame. He could kneel in front of Draco and ask for the flogging that would satisfy his masochistic instincts, his eyes wide and wet, and Draco could lash him with words, and Harry would writhe in ecstasy. He had the instincts of a hero sometimes and a martyr most of the time. He might even consider that he was more strongly bound to Draco now, from guilt and blame and the need to make up for something that hadn’t been his fault in the first place.

Maybe. If Draco decided he didn’t want to waste his time blaming Harry.

A fine pair we make, Draco decided sourly, and buried his head in his arms.

*

It hadn’t taken long to find what he needed. After all, if Harry hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to it at first, he had seen it around plenty of times now. He checked to make sure that it was still firmly under his arm, and then stepped forwards to confront the Aurors who guarded Holder’s tent.

They came to attention and then stared at him. They hadn’t expected to see a trainee, Harry knew, and especially not Harry Potter. He stood firmly and stared at them, and waited until the one on the left asked, “What are you doing here?”

“I have a message for Auror Holder.” Harry was amazed at the sound of his voice. It was firm and confident, not undermined by the fine tremor that had begun to run through his muscles. Well, why not? He wasn’t good at lying, but he was good at protecting, and he would risk a lot more than this for Draco.

The sentries glanced at each other, stared at him for some time more, and then simultaneously shook their heads. The one on the left, who seemed to have more initiative, muttered something and then ducked into the tent. The one on the right cleared his throat and tried to look threatening without having much in the way of threat that he could bother Harry with. Harry tried very, very hard to look as if he wasn’t going to laugh.

The thought of what he carried under his arm and what had happened to Draco cured that impulse. The sentry took a step backwards, in fact, as if afraid of the expression on his face.

The second guard came out a short time later and said, “She’ll see you, Trainee Potter.” He put a lot of emphasis on “Trainee,” as if that should remind Harry of his place, but he was holding the tent flap open like a servant, and Harry was still the one who walked past him with a regal little nod.

You’re crazy, said the pounding of his heart in his ears. This is crazy.

But it might also be the only way that they could help Draco. A glamour could be seen through, or disrupted by a carefully placed Finite from one of the Aurors—even one who didn’t mean them any harm but just wanted to make sure that Draco didn’t have an unfair advantage to help him in class. A magical eye might work, but Harry wasn’t sure that Draco wanted one and they couldn’t get one by tomorrow.

Besides, it’s not even so much the missing eye that’s the problem, Harry thought, as he jerked to a stop in front of Holder, as the story we have to tell them.

Holder had risen to her feet and was studying him with a cool gaze that made Harry imagine she was never taken off-guard, not even in the middle of the night. He had seen her angry, he thought, but he had never seen her upset, really. She had a deep blue robe on that might be her sleeping robe. Harry shuddered and cut his imagination off before it could lead him in the direction of what she wore to bed.

“Trainee Potter,” she said, and the guard’s emphasis on his title was nothing compared to hers. “What message do you have for me? I can only think it one from Nihil, by the expression on your face, and yet you aren’t writhing in agony from your broken oath. Interesting.” She gave him a serpent’s smile, and waited.

Harry located her wand—held in her hand, low by her hip—and decided to keep track of it. “It’s a different kind of message,” he said. “Not from Nihil, but from me. Of course, if I’d said that, then the guards never would have let me past.”

To his astonishment, her smile broadened a bit and she bowed her head to him as if conceding the point. “That is true,” she said. “You cannot know how many interesting points of gossip have passed me by because of the hesitation of my guards. I choose slightly stupid ones now as a matter of principle. What do you have to tell me?”

Harry said, “I want you to understand one thing first, before I offer the words.”

“Then do tell me that.” Holder’s voice had grown one half-tone icier.

Harry held out the book into which Draco had copied the information he’d found in Holder and Robards’s “real” book. It was less remarkable in appearance than the original, and so he didn’t blame Holder for opening it with a look of boredom. Whatever she expected to find in it, it obviously wasn’t what she found.

She went so still that Harry’s wand hand rose almost of its own accord. He’d seen people look like that right before they tried to kill him. But she only breathed out and tilted backwards, balancing her weight on her heels, as she stared at him. Then she said, “I see.”

Harry felt his jaw drop. He had expected to cringe at her tone of voice. It would be so filled with hatred and anger, he thought, that he would fight not to run away.

Instead, Holder sounded—amused.

“What?” he asked stupidly, and her eyebrows rose in a derisive flick that he flinched from for other reasons. He kept his wand trained on her, though. Maybe this was a means of getting him to stumble around in a daze so she could attack.

“You were smarter than I thought you were,” she said, and her voice this time was pleased. Harry resisted the urge to thump his head or pinch his arm. He wasn’t dreaming. If he was dreaming, then nothing would ever have happened to Draco, because he could wake from a nightmare that bad. “I did not know that anyone realized the existence of the book, let alone that of false information we are feeding the Aurors. We should have guarded its existence better. Since you won the game, I have no recourse but to allow myself to be checkmated.”

“Er, right,” Harry said, and made the careful decision never, ever to tell Holder that the book’s discovery had been an accident. “So. You know what this could do to you if we wanted to expose the information.”

Holder sighed. “It is called blackmail, Mr. Potter.” Harry wondered if she’d demoted him already in her mind. On the other hand, from her, maybe Mr. was a better title than Trainee. “I recognize it, of course. The question that remains is what you want me to do because of it.”

“You won’t lie and say that we found something that doesn’t implicate you?” Harry asked cautiously. He would at least have tried denial, if it was him.

“With Veritaserum and the other means of finding out the truth, they would know who was lying and who was not soon enough,” Holder said calmly. “We should have tried to prepare ourselves better for such an eventuality. We did not. On our heads be it.” Perhaps sensing Harry’s still-great incredulity, she shook her head and said, “One should suffer for one’s stupidity.”

Harry swallowed and nodded. I reckon I should just be glad that she’s as much a bitch to herself as she is to anyone else. “Uh. Well. I want you to know that we’ve been acting on our own again, and now we need to explain to you what’s been happening. But if you try to arrest us, torture us, or do anything else because we acted independently, then we have this.” He hefted the book.

“I think this is your technique, and not your partner’s,” Holder said conversationally. “It has your flavor to it.”

“That doesn’t really matter,” Harry said, and glared at her. He thought the glare was stone-cold, but Holder didn’t seem impressed, so it was possible that it wasn’t. “Are you going to listen to me, or not?”

Holder nodded. “Go on.”

“We’ve discovered that Nihil can create balls of nothingness that devour a small part of the world,” Harry said. “Create enough of them and he can accomplish his goal of destroying everything so that he doesn’t have a body to reincarnate himself into. He wants to stop living, but he can’t do that as long as he has the ability to survive death.”

Holder let her eyelids droop almost shut. Harry knew she was listening, though. He would have been foolish to mistake the expression on her face for anything else. “Go on.”

“In a conflict with Nihil today,” Harry said tightly, “Draco lost an eye. We can’t hide this injury. We’re counting on you to come up with an explanation, and hide the more sensitive parts of the fight so that people who really don’t need to know, like the ones who would panic or betray us to Nihil, don’t learn about it. So. What are you going to do?”

“An eye,” Holder said, not with the sound of disbelief, but with a force that Harry thought was meant to help her commit her words to memory.

Harry nodded. “Scooped out by one of Nemo’s beasts.”

Holder turned and stared at the wall of the tent as though she assumed something was written there that would help her. “An eye,” she repeated.

“Do you understand what I said or not?” Harry demanded. “I wanted an alliance with you, so that you could help ease the stares and questions Draco’s going to get, and I was willing to share a bit of information, but maybe I should go and do that with someone who knows what the word ‘eye’ means.”

“Hush, Potter,” Holder said, in the gentlest tone that he had ever heard from her. “I am saying that to fix it in my mind.” She rose to her feet and prowled over so that she was near the fire burning in the brazier. She stared into the flames and raised her wand.

Harry flinched and prepared to cast a curse at her back, but she only flicked out a spell that made the fire explode in a roaring cascade of sparks. Holder thrust her hands into the sparks. Harry hissed, but if she felt any pain, she didn’t show it. She simply stood there until the sparks had all fallen on the floor and then turned around.

“Nihil has taken something from one of our trainees that he should not have had to give up,” she said quietly. “He might have died in battle. He chose to take the risks himself when he fetched the base for our weapons out of the void.” Harry started; he hadn’t realized she knew about that. “But this is an unacceptable sacrifice. You could have come and told me about it, and I would have gone to war without the blackmail.”

Harry had no response to that except to roll his eyes. “You’ve given us no reason to trust you,” he said.

“Yes,” Holder said. “I know. I still think you dangerously unstable, but I reckon saviors must be.” She started towards the tent flap.

Harry leveled his wand at her. “What are you going to do about Draco?” he demanded.

“Tell everyone enough of the truth to sweeten the blow,” Holder said. “And enough lies to make it seem as if he earned the injury in his service to us. I must awaken Gawain.”

“Is he going to agree to this?” Harry asked. He could hardly believe that Holder had agreed to this. He knew it had been a mad plan, going to her. Her standards extended even to herself, it seemed, and that was the reason it had worked.

Holder stared at him as if he was the one who had trouble with comprehension, repeated, “This is an unacceptable sacrifice,” and then turned around and ducked out of the tent.

Harry stood there, licking his lips and shaking. But no one came back and hit him with a curse or tried to steal the book, and when he checked, it still had writing on its pages.

He returned to the tent in a daze. Draco might not be happy with him in the morning, but at the very least, he would have an easier time of it now. There would be fewer stares and whispers; Holder and Robards would keep others fixed on the war with Nihil, not on the mystery of how Draco had earned that injury.

And they had the support of Robards and Holder, coerced though it was, for what it was worth.

Harry was starting to think that it might be worth more than he imagined.

He put the book back in its trunk, crawled in beside Draco, and closed his eyes. Nothing much had changed, but the roaring panic in his belly had shut up.