Chapter Thirty-One of 'Seasons of War'- To Begin to Move

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Thirty.

Title: Seasons of War (31/40)
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 Thirty-One—To Begin To Move

“Trainee Potter.”

Harry started badly. He had been on his way back to his and Draco’s tent after a private session with Ketchum; Harry was still having trouble with some of the more advanced tactics that Ketchum was showing their class. There was just too much thinking ahead, and Harry knew he wasn’t good at that, and he didn’t particularly want to become good at it. Thinking on his feet had served him well so far, and why couldn’t he go on doing it? But Ketchum insisted, so Harry attended the lessons twice a week.

He turned around and met Holder’s eyes. She stood there with something long, flat, and wrapped in paper held in her hands. From the care with which she held it, Harry thought it might have been a mirror, but he wasn’t sure.

“You must come with me,” Holder said. “I have something to show you.” She turned and walked away as though in no doubt that he would follow.

“Why can’t you tell me what it is?” Harry asked, not moving. Another thing he had a bad track record with, besides thinking ahead, was people summoning him mysteriously and not telling him what it was for. “We’re near the tent, and I know that you’ll want to see Draco, too.”

Holder paused and turned back towards him, more curious about his words than Harry would have thought she would be. “Why do you assume that?”

“Because I’ll only tell him anyway, even if you order me to keep it quiet,” Harry said patiently. “And because, in the pair of us, he’s the thinker.”

“Yet you were the one who made the alliance with Gawain and me,” Holder said.

“That was an act of rash madness,” Harry said, calmly quoting the description Draco had given him. He’d come to accept that he probably could have done better things than go to Holder with all their information like that, but it had turned out all right as well as eased the immediate need to be moving around and doing something. “Don’t you want to wait for him?”

“I have spoken with Portillo Lopez about some of her theoretical conclusions concerning your magic,” Holder said, which Harry thought was a stupid answer to his question until she continued. “She has told me nothing private, but has given me much food for thought, and that thought has led to a possible way of defeating Nihil. I believe that we will need Trainee Malfoy’s help in the end, but if he tries to take over in the beginning, as he is prone to, then he will only hinder the efforts we need from you.”

Harry licked his lips. He wanted to laugh aloud with hope at her words, and also with derision. Everyone they knew had been trying to think of a way to defeat Nihil, and now Holder just happened along and blithely announced that she’d thought of one?

“I still trust Draco more than I trust you,” he said. “And if we’re allies now, then you should want to lay out the truth in front of the whole comitatus, so that everyone understands the same things and they can ask questions I wouldn’t think of. There’s no reason to want to confine some of it exclusively to me unless you’re planning to set us against each other.”

“And here I thought Trainee Malfoy was the paranoid one.” Holder watched him with eyes squinting as though against strong sunlight. “You do realize, Trainee Potter, that you sound as though you don’t trust me?”

“I can’t help what I sound like,” Harry said. “I’m doing this in front of Draco, whatever it is, or not at all.”

He was prepared for Holder to shout, or storm, or step coldly away. Instead, she gave him a faint smile and a nod. “Good,” she murmured. “I wondered how strong the loyalty would be between you and Trainee Malfoy. I think that we will need both of you, in the end, and you must depend on each other.”

She placed the package in Harry’s arms—Harry staggered beneath its weight, and the carved frame that told him, yes, this was a mirror—and then strode ahead. “Come with me,” she called over her shoulder. “The sooner we reach your tent, the sooner we can find Trainee Malfoy and I can send you for the rest of the comitatus.”

Harry shook his head from side to side, feeling as though he had to clear wax out of his ears. He might understand individuals, he thought as he followed Holder, like Draco or Ron, but he would never understand pure-bloods as a whole, or their ways of scheming even around someone who was an ally, or their little “tests.”

*

Draco leaned forwards, staring, when Holder whipped the cloth from the mirror. This was the first object he had seen where the magic blazed and shimmered around it the way that it did around people. Draco had accepted that he simply couldn’t see the magic of inanimate things, having tested wands, knives, cups, and mirrors in the past few days, which was a pity, as it would have been a good method of spotting traps.

Either the mirror was powerful, or this was in some way an imitation of human magic. From the dark surface that faced them, showing no reflection from the eight people clustered in the tent—the comitatus plus Holder and Portillo Lopez—Draco was inclined to think it might be both. The surface showed a few faint and far sparks of stars, but then Draco moved his head and the stars changed. The constellations he had half-traced between them, out of habit from Hogwarts Astronomy classes, clashed and blurred and became completely unfamiliar. He narrowed his eyes and turned to Holder.

“What is this?” he asked. Granger, who had opened her mouth at the same time, probably to ask the same question, closed her mouth, looking annoyed.

“An artifact from the Ministry,” Holder said, turning and casting the mirror as much of a glance of affection as Draco thought he had seen her give at any person or thing, Robards excepted. “The Mirror of Secifircas.”

Granger was quicker than Draco this time, though no doubt he would have done better if it was written down. “The Mirror of Sacrifices?” she asked, looking both delighted and appalled. Draco knew her well enough by now to realize that the delight came from new knowledge. “Is it like the Mirror of Erised?”

“Very like.” Holder gave Granger the same faint smile she had sometimes worn around Draco, which made Draco wonder if they would have made a good apprentice-and-mentor team. “But the Mirror of Erised shows the heart’s desire. The Mirror of Secifircas shows the price that must be paid to achieve one’s desire.”

Draco shook his head. He could see Holder’s plan now, but he thought it so simple that he didn’t know why she hadn’t brought it up before. “So it could show us how to defeat Nihil? Why didn’t you bring this mirror out weeks ago?”

Holder gave him a dark look. She hated being accused of stupidity, Draco knew, even if it was in so many words rather than in a direct complaint. “Because not everyone can see the truth in this mirror,” she answered. “It is a very limited artifact, of historical curiosity more than anything else. First, the one who gazes into it must have the goal as her true heart’s desire, rather than simply telling herself she does. It is rare that real desire and real goal match. Almost always, someone who thinks herself committed to one war or one plan or one secret discovers that her lusts tend in another direction. Second, the person who gazes into it must have made a dear sacrifice in pursuit of that goal.” She looked at Draco’s eye.

Draco found it hard to breathe. He didn’t know if Holder realized the honor she had done him, and if she didn’t, he didn’t care to enlighten her, but this… This was a way to use the damage that Nihil had inflicted on him, to make the sacrifice worth something.

“That’s impossible,” Granger said, and then answered herself. “No, with the right combination of magical theory and reality, I could see it happening. But—I never thought of something like that.” Her voice sank into a mutter.

Draco resisted the temptation to say that magic would still go on and still exist even if Granger never learned anything again. He didn’t need Harry’s warning hand on his elbow to hold him back, either. That much, he had learned about the members of his comitatus. He glanced up and lifted an eyebrow at Holder, and she nodded and moved out of the way, gesturing towards the mirror as if introducing it to him.

Draco moved forwards and stared into the mirror.

For long moments, he saw nothing except the swirling darkness, painted with those faint spots of light, and had to fight down the fear that either Holder had been mistaken about the weight of his sacrifice or that she had brought a fake mirror here to mock him. Then, just as Harry’s fingers clamped down on his arm again, the darkness changed to a light-drenched vision.

The light was heavy, like smoke, and eddied in the same way. Draco squinted to focus his eyes. It was the same sight-tearing color as the yellow glamour that Nihil had sometimes appeared wrapped in, too, and he didn’t know if his magical eye could see it as well as the eye of flesh and blood. He didn’t think so, just based on how difficult it was for him to sort out figures from background.

But then the scene seemed to wrench sideways and snap a bit, and Draco was looking at the glamour Nihil had worn before, the glamour that melted into various configurations of mirrors and voices and faces, and, before him, one of the hovering dark balls of nothingness. Draco tried to see the surroundings, but the only thing he could make out for sure was a wall of stone. They seemed to be underground, which would make sense if he was using the Death Eater caches as headquarters.

Nihil cupped what could have been a hand or a paw or a fin around the ball of nothingness and stared at it lovingly. Then he blew on the ball and released it. Draco watched breathlessly as it soared up and hovered under the roof of the cavern. They hadn’t seen the one they’d discovered do that. He wondered what else Nihil could do to manipulate the balls, and how long it would be before he grew too powerful for them to stop.

Then he reminded himself that the mirror was supposed to show him a vision of what he could do to defeat Nihil, not simply something for him to marvel at, and leaned even closer, doing his best to understand.

Nihil stepped back, his mask tilted towards the ball. Draco couldn’t see his eyes—if he had any—but the pose was suggestive of longing to him. Nihil wanted to dive into the ball and become part of it, absorbed and ruthlessly taken away. Of course, that was what he wanted for all creation. Draco thought he must have been capable of entering the ball of nothingness himself if he wanted to, and wondered why he didn’t try.

Nihil turned, or did something that might have been turning on his heel in a normal person. His glamoured body grew smaller and smaller, thinning and wisping and breaking apart. It was painful to watch, and Draco shuddered. Harry’s hand tightened on his arm again.

The last of Nihil flowed into the ball, and then the ball was left, hovering there. Draco blinked. Perhaps this was a vision of how they could get rid of Nihil after all, but if so, he didn’t understand it. Nor did he understand what they would do with the ball of nothingness after Nihil was done, which obviously couldn’t be allowed to remain in the world. And wasn’t that a humiliating admission to take back to Holder and the comitatus that depended on him?

Someone stepped forwards.

The sight of Draco’s eyes faltered for the first time since it had adjusted to the scene in the mirror. There was something about the figure that he couldn’t glimpse. Perhaps it came wrapped in another heavy glamour like Nihil’s; perhaps someone from the future couldn’t be accurately defined even by an artifact as powerful as the Mirror of Secifircas. Whatever the cause, Draco saw nothing that would enable him to identify the person, should he see him, or her, or it, again.

The figure lifted up hands that shone with light and enfolded the ball of nothingness in them. Its hands blazed all the brighter when that was done. Draco told himself to remember that, the bright, clear light that came from them and cut through the heavy, smoke-like radiance in the cavern. The figure brought the clasped hands to its mouth and breathed on them, and then opened them. The ball of nothingness was gone.

A moment later, so was the vision in the mirror.

Draco stepped back and released a shaky breath. Harry moved with him, laying his head on Draco’s shoulder. Draco stroked his hair. He often underestimated how much seeing him go through something like this overwhelmed Harry. He should try not to forget it. After all, Harry had himself confessed that he did crazy things sometimes because he couldn’t stand to see the people he loved in danger.

“Well?” Holder asked, her voice edged with glass. “What did you see?”

Draco shook his head slightly and turned around. “Nihil lifting up one of those balls of nothingness that we discovered before,” he said. “He looked at it as if he loved it. Then he was gone into it. His body broke up.”

Holder’s brow pinched. “And you saw no sign of a weapon?” she demanded, not bothering to hide the disappointment in her tone. “I had thought for sure that the Mirror would show you a weapon.”

“I don’t know,” Draco said. “I would wager, though, that the truest desire in my heart is to get rid of Nihil, and that what I saw was the way to do it. Someone else came into being after Nihil was gone, held the ball of nothingness, blew on its hands, and opened them to show that the ball was gone.”

“What is this figure?” Holder said. “Its name? Its nature?”

Draco shook his head. “It was clad in light, like but not the same as the light around Nihil. I don’t know what it was. It might not even have been human, despite the hands I saw.”

Holder whirled around and kicked at the side of the tent, not even wincing when her boot ripped straight through the cloth. A low, steady stream of curses emerged from her mouth. Draco ignored her to turn and face the Mirror of Secifircas again.

“Will it grant me more than one vision?” he asked. “If I went away and then returned to focus my thoughts in a different direction, would it grant me a different answer?”

“How many different answers can there be?” Holder closed her eyes in what looked like hatred mixed with resignation. Hatred of the situation, Draco thought, not of him, or he would have worried about his back. “No, I don’t think that you should ask again. There’s no way that it would tell you the truth any more openly.”

“But that wasn’t the whole vision,” Harry said.

Draco felt his neck prickle, and turned to stare. Harry was watching both him and Holder with a slightly nervous, defiant tilt to his head. Draco had to swallow twice before he could answer. “What do you mean, Harry?”

“I saw it, too,” Harry said.

*

Harry didn’t know why they all stared at him as if he had another head on his shoulders. He had seen the vision from the moment that it started appearing in the mirror, and he had seen the same things that Draco had seen. Or, at least, he hadn’t had reason to think he didn’t until now, when Draco told part of the vision and then stopped.

“Why did you see it?” Draco whispered. His voice whirled and blurred with emotions. Harry shook his head. It sounded as though Draco was almost jealous, which didn’t make sense. Surely the more people who saw the vision and could help to interpret it to the comitatus, the better? Despite the details Draco had given, Harry thought he didn’t know what the vision meant, any more than Holder did.

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I’ve been touched by Nihil, too, though. Maybe that counts as enough of a sacrifice for the mirror.”

“I’ve given up,” Draco said, and then stopped the sentence short, turning his head away.

Harry grabbed his shoulder. He knew what Draco was going to say: that he had given up more than Harry had in the battle against Nihil and deserved to have this vision alone. Harry did understand, but he couldn’t change things, since he had seen it, too, and Holder was already leaning forwards as though she intended to suck the vision out of him by force.

“What else did you see?” she asked.

Harry glanced at Draco, but he said nothing else, standing there stubbornly. Harry sighed and answered. “The shining figure faded. I saw a book on a table. It was a large book, like a grimoire, bound in red and gold. The cover might have had a keyhole on it. The book opened, and a ball of nothingness was sitting in it. It didn’t have pages, though. It was hollow. Then the book shut, and I knew the ball of nothingness was gone.”

“How did you know?” Holder was practically in his face now, her nose driving in like the beak of a hawk.

Harry shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I was just certain.”

“A hollow book,” Hermione murmured, her eyes closed and a frown line between them. “Do you think it was like one of those books that people sometimes keep on their shelves to hide secrets in, Harry? Did it look like that?”

Harry nodded eagerly. He had known the book looked familiar, but the Muggle cultural reference helped him. “Yes! Like that. As if the book was only made as a container to look like a book from the outside, not actually meant to hold pages. I didn’t see any place where you could have fastened pages.”

Hermione made a soft, thoughtful noise in the back of her throat, but Holder got there before she could.

“A container,” she said. “A box. And the figure that Trainee Malfoy saw was enfolding the ball of nothingness in his hands. Perhaps we should look for a way to surround the nothingness with something that will hold it, after we have banished Nihil back into the nothingness.”

“How are we going to do that?” Ron asked. “What can you enfold nothingness with? Won’t it just get out and leak back into the world?”

Harry nodded to Ron. Just like Hermione’s image of the empty book, those words were the objection he would have liked to have made but couldn’t think of how to phrase. Holder turned to answer Ron, but Herricks interrupted, his voice quiet and firm.

“Surround nothingness with existence,” he said. “Malfoy said that the light around the figure wasn’t the same as the light around Nihil. I’ve caught a glimpse of that glamour in Ursula’s memories, and I think I know what he means. Nihil’s light is the light of headache, of fever, the kind that you see when you press down on your eyelids. But the light on the figure Malfoy saw was the real light. What’s the opposite of nothingness? Reality.”

“And how are we going to wrap something up in reality?” Hermione was looking around as though she wanted parchment and ink so that she could write down the suggestions that flew through her head. Hermione had never trusted that people wouldn’t just forget brilliant ideas, Harry thought, amused. “There’s no way to summon or contain reality itself, as far as I know.”

“There are ways,” Holder said, eyes fired with a glory that made it hard to look at her. Harry thought he knew now why Robards had chosen her for his second-in-command. She wasn’t particularly skilled at holding the good will of her subordinates, but in moments like this, she would be capable of leading them. “There must be ways. Now that we know what the weapon should be made of, we can make one, as Malfoy and Potter made weapons out of the void.” She turned and strode towards the entrance from the tent as though the walls around her were firm barriers separating her from the completion of such a weapon.

“Auror Holder,” Draco said, his voice strained and dry. “What about the Mirror of Secifircas?”

“It can remain here for the moment,” Holder said over her shoulder. “I’ll send someone to fetch it soon.” And she vanished, and left a whirlwind of emotion behind as a reminder of her passing. Harry shook his head in wonder. He would have actually liked her to stay, for the first time since they started being allies, because he took comfort from her certainty and energy.

Draco’s face said that he didn’t want people to stay, though, and they began to drift away. Portillo Lopez was looking thoughtful. Harry took that for a hopeful sign.

When even she was gone, he turned to Draco and asked, bluntly, because he couldn’t think of any other way to do it, “Why were you so upset that I saw the vision?”

*

Draco grimaced. He had dreaded trying to explain this to Harry, but he had known he would have to, because Harry wasn’t the kind of person who would let a lover’s anger go undiscussed.

And Draco was a bit ashamed of the way he had reacted—which only contributed to his dread, of course.

He licked his lips. “Seeing the vision made me feel as if my sacrifice could be worth something,” he said. “When you could see it, too—it seemed that what I suffered under Nihil, and the usefulness of my having lost an eye, was mitigated. I’m—sorry.” The words stuck in his throat. The joy he had felt when Holder explained the Mirror’s nature was a private joy, and exposing it this way still felt awkward and wrong.

But Harry smiled at him. “I understand,” he said. “And to be honest, I didn’t think at all about what I’d suffered under Nihil, or that it was comparable to your sacrifice.”

Draco leaned forwards and kissed him, deeply, urgently. He was reminded all over again of what kind of person Harry was, and why he had fallen in love with him, and he vowed—if he could keep the vow—not to forget again.

Harry laughed, bright-eyed and happy, and did something with his hands and his tongue that gave Draco another reason to be glad that everyone had left.