Chapter Twenty-Seven of 'Seasons of War'- The Virtues of Cooperation

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Twenty-Six.

Title: Seasons of War (27/40)
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-Seven—The Virtues of Cooperation

“I am not yet reconciled to your impertinence.”

Harry winced a bit. He didn’t like Holder and thought her intimidating, but there was something worse about the stillness that Robards faced them with, even with his hands flat on his desk instead of pointing accusing fingers.

Draco, perhaps because he had been the one who made the alliance with Robards and Holder official, didn’t seem as bothered. All he did, in fact, was give Robards one polite smile before he reached down to the packet of papers in his lap and chose the top one. His eye focused on it carefully before he passed it across the desk to Robards. Harry realized that he didn’t know how well Draco could read since the loss of his eye.

Something else to ask him, when we’re alone and have more time, he decided, and gave Robards a dubious glance when he saw how still he had grown. Did he distrust the document that Draco had handed him?

“This is a copy of our information,” Robards whispered.

“I only wanted to remind you that we did see everything you recorded in your secret, real book,” Draco said dryly. “We managed to get through the wards and take it without your noticing. We have skills that you need, and your she-wolf has made me bargains and promises. I wanted to ensure that you kept them.”

Robards and Holder exchanged a series of mute glances. Harry wasn’t sure what they said with those eyes. They had the companionability of people who had worked together for a long time, he thought, far longer than he and Draco had.

“Very well,” Robards said, and whether it was an honest agreement or just an agreement with whatever Holder had communicated to him, Harry didn’t know, but the words made Draco’s shoulders relax. “How are we to defeat Nihil? Alice seemed to think you had some recommendations in that line, though, if you have, you have so far not employed them to great advantage.”

Harry winced. Draco kept smiling, and even shook his head slightly as though reprimanding a favorite relative. “We have not had anyone but the six of us to trust and count upon,” he murmured. Robards and Holder knew about the comitatus, but Harry didn’t think they knew about the alliance with the Aurors led by Ketchum, and he was glad that Draco hadn’t mentioned them. “With your money and influence behind us—and the other Aurors, if they agree to work with us—we can do a lot more.”

Robards nodded as if he hated admitting that, and then turned to Harry. “Do you only sit tamely by and nod to every suggestion he makes?” he asked.

Harry blinked, caught off-guard by the attack. He felt Draco press his hand warningly against Harry’s hip, but he shook it off. It wasn’t as though he needed the reminder of how fragile their alliance was, or that he needed to be careful with his words. Draco and Robards had just proved that for themselves, pretty effectively.

“No,” he said. “I do let him take the lead in situations like this, because he does it better than me. On the battlefield, I’m better.”

Draco hissed at him. Harry ignored him again. Yes, Draco was the one who could come up with plans and strategies, and the one who had several times commanded the comitatus. Harry wouldn’t argue with that. He was going to argue with the notion that Draco was the one who really led in dangerous situations, though. Harry’s instincts would take him over and propel him forwards whether he wanted them to or not.

“Are you,” Robards said, but it wasn’t a question. He exchanged a glance with Holder again. This time, Harry had the distinct impression that she had shrugged to indicate that she didn’t know whether he was speaking the truth or not. But that might only have been because both of her shoulders had moved at the same time. Robards nodded as if uninterested and then turned around and looked at Harry again. “Stand up and cast the most powerful spell that you know how to cast.”

Harry smiled. He didn’t think it was a nice smile, just based on the way that Holder narrowed her eyes and shifted as if she would put her body in front of Robards. Well, that was fair. He hadn’t meant it to be nice. “If I do that, I’ll destroy the tent, sir. The most powerful spells I know are based on our compatible magic and my blood necromancy.” He saw no reason to suggest that it wasn’t necromancy, which Portillo Lopez believed, until their alliance was more secure.

Holder leaned over and murmured urgently in Robards’s ear. He listened to her without moving, just nodding and saying several times, “Are they?” or “How interesting,” or other similarly uninformative phrases. Then he looked at Harry, cocked his head as if deliberating about something, and said, “Say I believe you. How are you going to prove that you aren’t mere muscle?”

Harry felt Draco’s leg pressing, cautioning, into his again. He shifted to the side to show Draco that he had felt it, and said, “Mere muscle couldn’t have defeated Voldemort or kept me alive all the other times that Nihil tried to kill me.” He was secretly delighted to see that Robards flinched at Voldemort’s name and that Holder tightened her lips as though watching a sticky child, although neither of them said anything. “I have luck, sir. And instinct. It’s hard to demonstrate because it doesn’t tend to function outside emergency situations. But it’s there.”

“Luck,” Robards said. “Is that what you call it, to bring your partner back without an eye?”

“Yes,” Harry said, ignoring the hiss of breath from Draco. Really, he was doing better than Draco was at ignoring the insults, maybe because he had been expecting them. After all, the bargain that Draco had told him about Holder making didn’t prevent insults. “He could have been dead.”

“The eye is an unacceptable sacrifice,” Holder said. In the silence dance between her and Robards, it was apparently her turn to speak again now. “But we do not truly know what kind of beast you faced in that darkness.”

Harry shook his head. “Neither do we. But we know that it’s called the Dark Argus, or at least that’s a good approximation of a name, and that Nihil found its bones in—”

Draco’s elbow hit him hard enough to make him release all the air he’d inhaled to talk, and as he bent over, wheezing, Draco said, “Do excuse my partner. He likes to gamble with our secrets. I prefer to trade.”

Holder, for one moment, looked at both of them with a mouth full of laughter. Harry thought she might burst out with it, but she turned her head down and murmured, “Of course. But it seems that you know our secrets already, and we have a good idea of yours. I think the trade is unnecessary.”

“It is not,” Draco said. Harry could hear anger sparking under the surface of his voice, and he tried to apologize with a look. Draco wasn’t looking back, though, so that didn’t matter. “I want to know more about what you’ve done to try and track down Nihil. Were you planning a great trap? Were you deliberately holding back so that you could lull him into feeling off-guard? What plan did you want to try, to get rid of Nemo?”

Holder held out one hand and moved it back and forth. After a puzzled second, Harry figured out what she was doing: imitating a balance scale. “Those are heavy secrets,” she said. “Tell us what you will give in return.”

“I don’t know how valuable they are,” Draco said. “Perhaps I’ll find out that I’ve traded Galleons for Knuts.”

Holder smiled appreciation. Harry shook his head. They could sit here trading metaphors until Nihil conquered all of them, and he honestly wasn’t sure if Holder and Draco would even notice. Robards might be a different kind of person, but he sat back and watched Holder as if he was content to let her bargain.

“Can I say something?” Harry asked.

He got irritated glances for his interruption, but he tried not to care and continued talking. “This is all fine, but we’re supposed to be allies now. Don’t we need to stop discussing the terms of the trade and actually talk to each other?”

“We are allies because of a bargain,” Holder said. “We must keep to the terms of the bargain.”

“Even if we lose the war because of it?” Harry was starting to think that he would never understand pure-bloods, no matter how long he lived with Draco.

“Even so.” Holder firmed her mouth into a prim little smile.

Harry turned for help to Robards, which was not something he had thought he would be doing before he entered the tent. But someone had to stop this madness, and he thought Holder listened to Robards far better than she would listen to either of them. “Sir? Do you think the same thing? Do the Aurors mean less to you than the terms of this bargain?”

The Head Auror leaned back in his seat, and went on leaning back until Holder frowned and turned around to look at him. He met her eyes. Whatever she saw there made her shrink back, one hand grasping the edge of the desk as though it hurt but she couldn’t let it go.

“I care about the Aurors,” Robards said. His voice was deep and calm and quiet, and Harry had never heard it like that before. He thought Robards would have made converts of them a lot sooner if he had. “I care about them so much that I do not know if I can abandon them to the mistaken, misguided opinions of the people who would be their saviors whether they want saviors or not. On the other hand, if we do nothing, Nihil may overwhelm us.” He made a swift, cutting gesture with one hand, and then stopped the hand and raised his eyebrows, glancing sideways at them as if inviting them to share a confidence. “You see the difficulty of my position.”

Yes, Harry thought he saw it, and it impressed him in a way it hadn’t before.

Robards leaned forwards, his hands clasped on his desk. “But trusting only to ourselves has done no good, either,” he said meditatively. “You were able to get through the wards, and Nihil has come through, too, even if he has no spies in our camp.” He looked at Draco for a second, specifically at his missing eye, but he was so good at keeping his expression calm that Harry couldn’t tell what he really felt. “Doom is certain if we do nothing. So I feel it right to take a risk, and trust you. We will tell you everything we know.” He raised an eyebrow. “Do you feel confident enough to do the same?”

Harry started to open his mouth to answer, but Draco cut in. “No.”

Harry frowned at him. “Why not?” he demanded in a hissing whisper, which he didn’t care if Robards and Holder heard. “It’s not as though we can act effectively on our own now, when I’ve tipped our hand and when we have an idea of how much we’re missing. We need to stop hiding and get official support.”

“Because I don’t trust them,” Draco said, and he turned to face Harry, lifting his eyelid back from his empty socket. Harry winced. Somehow, seeing the connection of the socket to the scars across Draco’s face was more hurtful to him than just seeing the eye gone. “And I think I’ve paid the highest price here. I should be able to dictate how the bargaining goes.”

Harry looked at the floor and scolded himself silently. All these things seemed to happen because he hadn’t been thinking. But he didn’t know how catch himself not-thinking before the evil consequences happened, so he was quiet.

“You have the ability to dictate terms for your partner, perhaps,” Robards said. He didn’t sound as though he was moved by what Draco had said, but then again, looking at that bloody inflexible face, Harry didn’t think he would necessarily be able to tell if the man was moved. “You do not have the ability to dictate terms for us, or for the world that will be destroyed if Nihil has his way.”

Draco could glare more fiercely with one eye than he had with two, sometimes, Harry discovered. “I will have my power,” Draco whispered. “I will have my dignity. Stand in my way, and you will find how hard I will fight to retain those.”

Harry winced again. He didn’t know if Draco had meant to speak that openly; a moment later, his cheeks flooded with color. But he didn’t look at the floor. He looked at Robards, and then at Holder when she acted as though she might open her mouth and speak.

Robards bowed his head abruptly. Harry thought he was hiding laughter until he said, “I will honor your request. If you only tell me what you want. So far, I find your demands as vague as they are unaccountable.”

*

Draco tried to hide his shock that he had got away with it. He had made the challenge out of desperation. He wasn’t going to lose his power and his influence as soon as he had won them, simply because Harry was intent on giving all their secrets away and Holder would have been glad to see him fail. He had fought for this. He had won it. He was going to keep it.

And then Robards had folded, much more easily than Draco had thought he would.

It made him wonder if there was a trap in this, or, worse, pity. But no matter how he stared at Robards, no matter how many silent moments passed, Robards simply waited. Draco decided that the silence was making him look like he was the unreasonable and stupid one, and spoke harshly into it.

“I want you to promise that I won’t be poked and prodded by people I don’t approve of, looking for some way to grow my eye back. I want you to ensure that everyone will know our discoveries were our discoveries.”

“It may be some time before we can announce who found them, simply because it may be some time before we can announce the discoveries themselves,” Robards murmured.

Draco dismissed this. He knew an excuse when he heard one. “I want the comitatus to stay together and act as an independent unit, respected as one by you and the other Aurors who lead us. When you can publicize our work, then I insist that you do so. And I insist that you not penalize us in the Auror program after the war for what we might do during it.”

“If you murder another Auror,” Holder began.

Draco shot her a look that he hoped was rich with contempt. At least she didn’t seem able to stand stares from his one eye as well as he thought she should be able to, so that might hold her back. “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about using torture on Nihil’s servants, since it’s one of the few weapons we have, and possibly taking kills from Aurors, and defending ourselves against people who wish us harm.”

Holder and Robards retreated into their silent communion again, a trading of glances and raised eyebrows and tilted heads that seemed pregnant with significance. Draco knew that Harry probably thought every little gesture had a meaning. Draco was convinced that half of it didn’t and was simply intended to impress their new allies with how closely they had worked together in the past. It didn’t impress Draco that much, given that they had already disagreed in front of him and Harry.

Then Robards turned back to him and nodded. “All right. And if you are thinking of demands like us allowing you to venture into the field, such consequences will naturally follow from treating your—comitatus—as an independent unit.” The way his mouth twisted when he said “comitatus” made Draco wonder if he had a special reason to dislike that word, such as historical or personal motives. Draco promptly resolved to mention the word in front of him at every opportunity.

“Very well,” Draco said. He actually didn’t have any other demands to make. On the other hand, he didn’t see why they needed the information about the Dark Argus now. He could keep that and trade it later, when he had seen that Robards and Holder were keeping their promises. He rose to his feet. “Do we have anything more to discuss?”

Holder looked as if she were chewing on a lemon, but also as if she understood the point he was trying to make. Robards looked as if he understood it and wanted to laugh. Draco nodded to both of them, since he found that he got no response to his question, and then turned magnificently away. Harry followed him obediently, looking back sometimes as though he thought Robards and Holder would stop him.

“I’m surprised we got away with that much,” Harry mused as they strolled through the camp on the way back to their tents. Draco marked the way that people looked at him. There was pity on some faces, yes, but they turned away hastily when they saw his glare. And on others were more complex expressions that he couldn’t read with the difference in his sight. But he didn’t let them see that he was struggling. Another set of stares, more cool and less furious, made them turn away, too.

“It’s less than they owe us,” Draco said shortly. “If they had trusted us earlier and let us do as they should have, instead of treating us like enemies, then we might have settled the war with Nihil already.” Before this happened to me. The words burned on the end of his tongue, but he didn’t say them. He was trying to remember that Harry had some intelligence, too, though it ran in much different tracks from his own.

“We didn’t trust them, either,” Harry pointed out, in the reasonable tone that he used when he wanted to imitate Granger.

“We had reason not to trust them,” Draco said “But you had saved the world once that they knew of. Without knowing all the reasons that they might have been able to trust us because we were fighting Nihil, they still chose to reject and attack us.”

Harry frowned for a moment, then shook his head and lapsed into silence. Draco turned around to face him. They were close enough to their tent by now that he didn’t think anyone would overhear, but he kept his voice to a low, controlled snap anyway. “Why? What’s the matter? Did you think that they should be excused?”

“Not that,” Harry said. “The way they’ve treated you is inexcusable. You’re right about that. They could have solved some of their problems long ago by working with us, and they chose not to.”

“You said you,” Draco said. “Did you not think that you were included in that?”

Harry sighed, a long, complicated sound that seemed to travel up from his toes and ruffle his hair in its passing. “I don’t know how to answer that.”

“You seem contented to put yourself outside the circle that encloses me,” Draco said. “Is this another form of sacrificing yourself so that someone else can benefit from it?”

“Maybe?” Harry offered a faint smile that Draco didn’t return. Harry shook his head again. “I reckon that I was—I mean, I simply wanted to—I didn’t expect treatment that was much different from the Head of the Aurors. Everyone except maybe McGonagall has either distrusted me or trusted me too much, the way Dumbledore did. They’re suspicious that I didn’t use my skills to get ahead, but luck, the way I told Robards today. It’s hard to harness luck, hard to teach it to anyone else. So I reckon that it hurt me to see you doubted, because I know that you’re more competent, but I can see why they might doubt me, because they have reason to think I wasn’t driven along by competence.”

Draco had to turn his face away.

“Draco?” Harry’s voice was wary and alarmed. “Is something the matter?” He sighed again and came closer, though he halted before he took Draco into his arms. “Shite,” Draco heard him mutter. “I always seem to fuck something up.”

But in this case, it wasn’t a fuck-up, and Draco couldn’t let Harry go on thinking it was. He turned around and shook his head, keeping his voice as calm as he could. “It isn’t that, Harry. I simply always forget how much you put me first and how much you bear without complaining about. I spend too much time thinking of you as stupid and rash and not much else. I needed reminders that you could have some virtues, too.”

Harry looked torn between flushing in pleasure and flushing in anger, and in the end he settled for an embarrassed laugh and taking Draco into an embrace after all. “Thanks,” he murmured into his hair. “Really, as long as my friends believe in me, then why do I need anyone else?”

Draco pinched the skin between his ribs. Harry yelped. “I hope that I’m more to you than just a friend,” Draco breathed. He cocked his head back, hating that he couldn’t seem to see the whole of Harry’s face unless he held his head in just the right way. “I should be, after all we’ve shared.”

Harry gave him a kiss that stole his breath and soothed some of the anxiety Harry’s words had provoked. Then he actually got down on one knee in the mud, and Draco almost hoped that someone was looking, after all.

Harry looked up at him solemnly and took Draco’s hands in his. A small breeze rippled his fringe and made him look ridiculous but also real. Draco thought he would have laughed. Instead, the laughter lodged in his throat.

“I wish I could have been all you needed,” Harry whispered. “Stronger. Quicker. More generous and smarter. But I haven’t been.”

Draco pulled on his hands. “I just got through telling you that I don’t appreciate you enough, and you do this?” he demanded. “I don’t understand you.”

“Shhh.” Harry looked absorbed in the moment. Draco was unwillingly brought to feel the same thing, and had to blink back at him.

“I wish I could be that way,” Harry whispered. “But since I can’t be that way all the time, and since I’ll make mistakes, I just want to remember this moment. I’ll always remember it, that you think me worth appreciating even though I’m not perfect.”

“You can be wonderful without being perfect,” Draco whispered back.

“Sometimes I feel otherwise, with you,” Harry said.

It was Draco’s turn to flush. It was true that he’d had his lost eye on his mind in the past few days, but his thinking that Harry potentially had less intelligence than he did went much further back.

“Thank you,” Harry said, and stood and kissed his cheek, not minding about the mud on the knees of his trousers.

They went inside the tent, where Draco could think of little else to offer but ordinary words or kisses. He chose the kisses, and Harry accepted eagerly.