Chapter Seven of 'Soldier's Welcome'- How to Confront Your Best Friends
Title: Soldier’s Welcome (7/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: R
Pairings: Harry/Draco preslash, Ron/Hermione
Warnings: Violence (and plenty of it), profanity, references to sex, takes account of DH but ignores the epilogue, heavy angst.
Summary: It’s the first year of Auror training for Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, and…Draco Malfoy, But with Hagrid, Snape’s second Pensieve, rogue Death Eaters, Auror classes, and someone trying to start a second war to worry about, Harry might not have the time to pay that much attention to Malfoy. At first, anyway.
Author’s Notes: This story is the first in a trilogy called Running to Paradise, which takes its title from a W. B. Yeats poem. Each story will be novel-length, and each will cover a year of Harry and Draco’s training as Aurors. Though there are a lot of fics out there about them acting as Auror partners, there aren’t as many about their training, so I hope to cover some original ground there. I’m indebted to a reader named SP777 for suggesting a training fic for me to write.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Seven-How to Confront Your Best Friends
“Talk, Harry.”
Hermione’s words had weight, Harry thought. They lay on his skin like stones, and on his tongue, too. He stared at her sitting in a chair she’d conjured across from Harry’s bed-because she didn’t trust the rickety excuses for furniture in their room, she’d said-and leaning forwards. He thought she would have been putting her hands on her hips if it was possible with the position she was in. She was so expectant that every time he tried to think of the words, his memory failed him.
“Well?”
“Give him a chance to talk, Hermione,” Ron snapped. He was prowling around the far side of the room, his hands nervously fiddling with the Quidditch posters. Harry could see the small flying players in the nearest poster looking apprehensively at Ron, as if they were afraid that he would rip them off the wall if he didn’t stop flipping the edges of the paper like that. “I think he’ll need time to think of anything that can explain what happened to him in Combat, or in Offensive and Defensive.” He turned around and settled his back against the wall, glaring skeptically at Harry. His arms were folded.
Harry swallowed. “I meant what I said in Combat. That-shaking-happens to me when I’m under too much stress.”
“But you never showed it in the past year,” Hermione said, and then paused.
Harry groaned silently. He knew, from the way her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open, that she was mentally traveling through all the times in the past year when he’d said that he needed to be alone and excused himself, especially when Ron and Hermione already had private plans for the evening. Most of those times had been when he thought another fit would come on, but not all of them.
“It’s not as bad as you think,” he began.
“But what happens to you during them?” Hermione insisted. “We could only see that you were shaking, but it’s more than that, Harry, isn’t it?”
Harry sighed and bowed his head. “It’s more than that,” he agreed reluctantly, even as he tried to figure out how much he could tell them without rousing further concern. Hermione would probably try to get him to go to a counselor or a Mind-Healer or whatever the wizarding world’s equivalent of a Muggle psychologist was, and Harry didn’t want to. There wasn’t anyone out there who could treat him fairly if they knew who he was, he thought, and the treatment would be useless if they didn’t know who he was. He hadn’t noticed anyone else having trouble like this since the war, so that must mean it was Harry’s problem and only Harry’s problem. Maybe it was connected to killing Voldemort, or being the master of the Elder Wand, or dying and coming back. He really had no idea.
And no desire to explore it. He wanted a normal life. He didn’t want yet another reason for his name to become famous, or infamous.
That meant deflecting Hermione was the most important thing.
So he lifted his head, smiled a bit, and shrugged. “One of the reasons I avoided telling you is that it’s so silly,” he said. “It looks worse than it really is. Yes, you see me shaking, but inside my head, I’m just tired.”
“Tired?” Hermione leaned forwards and surveyed him. Ron watched him with dark eyes. Harry didn’t think he really needed to worry about fooling Ron. He was much more interested in what the fuck Harry was doing sharing compatible magic with Malfoy than he was in the fits. Harry knew that much from the way his best mate had looked at him in Dearborn’s class, and, more to the point, looked away.
“Yes,” Harry said. “I don’t know how to explain it. I see hallucinations, and floating colors, and feel the urge to yawn until my jaw cracks. I feel like I would be all right if I could just yawn.” He shrugged helplessly. “I know those are signs of sleep deprivation. I think everything would change if I could just get more sleep.”
As he had known she would, Hermione seized the rather large hint for a solution and leaped to her feet, beaming. “Of course! I’ll make sure that you can have some Dreamless Sleep Potion, and that should solve your problem.”
Harry played along, making his expression deep and serious. “But isn’t Dreamless Sleep addictive? I don’t think I like the sound of that, Hermione.”
Hermione laughed at him. “It’s only addictive if you take it for long periods of time and without proper supervision. There’s a lesser potion that you can take in between the Dreamless Sleep, and it doesn’t keep you in a coma-like state the way that Dreamless Sleep does, but it does make it easier for you to dismiss nightmares.” She was bouncing on her toes, her eyes shining. “I’ll ask Auror Roto right away.”
Harry was about to ask who Auror Roto was, and then remembered: the instructor in Battle Brewing. Well, if anyone would know something about potions and probably be receptive to what Hermione wanted to do, it was him. He was the opposite of Snape in temper, according to Hermione.
Let her do it, he thought, smiling at his friend and enjoying the way she smiled back. It’ll make her happy, and on nights when I really do need to get some sleep, like before an exam, it’ll make things easier for me, too.
In reality, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to block the nightmares. It was the days after the nights without dreams, like today, that he had the most intense fits.
Hermione bounced to the door, and then Ron cleared his throat pointedly. “Harry still hasn’t told us what was happening in Dearborn’s class,” he said.
Hermione blinked and turned around. “That’s right, Harry. What happened? You and Malfoy acted like you had fought together before.” By the end of the sentence, she looked her usual combination of suspicious and interested when she was determined to find out a secret.
Harry groaned in silence. It would have been easier to tell the truth to Ron alone than both Ron and Hermione. He and Ron would probably have a fight about it, but in the end they would patch up the fight, and Ron could break the news to Hermione. Now he had to worry about both truth and Ron’s happiness at once.
He wondered again if he really wanted to be an Auror. It was so much work, and there was so little reward, so far. Most of his teachers wanted more effort from him, he made his best friends angry and worried, and he had to spend time with Malfoy, his least favorite person in the world now that Voldemort, Snape, and Bellatrix were all dead. Maybe it would be better to just go live in a nice quiet cottage somewhere.
And then he remembered that he would have to live in the cottage without Ron and Hermione.
And without Ginny.
Let’s not think about Ginny, he chanted to himself, and nodded. He had to tell the truth now, at least, because he knew that Ron had probably recognized exactly what the compatible magic was thanks to a pure-blood education. So he would do that and worry about placating Ron when he’d spoken the truth. “Malfoy and I have compatible magic. We discovered it by accident when we found that strange illusion and message in the corridor together.” That sounded plausible, and it kept Harry from having to tell them about the private dueling lessons. Ron would be so angry about that that he would start shouting, and their fight would last longer than it would if Harry could keep him calm at first. “So we can’t directly fight each other. We can’t even hex each other,” he added, putting his anger at the situation behind those words. “We knew that we couldn’t duel when Dearborn asked us to. But we work very well together.”
“Of course you do,” Ron muttered, his voice low and ugly and sad. That last was the hardest part for Harry to deal with. “Of course, if you had to have compatible magic with someone, it would be that slimy Slytherin instead of me.”
Harry turned to face Ron and told the truth as fiercely as he could, because it would make Ron happy this time. “There’s no one I would rather have compatible magic with than you, Ron. Malfoy’s a git, I hate him, and I hate that I can’t change this and I have to have this-this with him.”
Ron licked is lips and blinked. “But I’ve heard that wizards with compatible magic usually become friends,” he muttered. “It feels so good to fight like that, in tandem with someone, that they don’t have a choice.”
“I always want to have a choice,” Harry said, wincing at the thought of being forced to feel any differently for Malfoy than he did now. “But even if I had to like him, mate, do you think it can really stand up against all the fighting we’ve done together, and the pranks, and looking for Horcruxes, and sharing those years in Gryffindor?” He reached out, grabbed Ron’s shoulder, and shook it. “Because it can’t for me. Malfoy can’t have the position of my best friend. It’s already taken.”
Ron reached out and hugged him. It was brief-Ron always made it that way-but Harry valued it anyway, because he could count on one hand the number of times Ron had hugged him. Most of the time, he left that up to his mother and Hermione.
“Thanks, Harry,” he said, when he pulled back. His face was calm and bright both at once, as though he had swallowed a mouthful of Felix Felicis. “I’ll tell the prat that if he tries to say something to me.”
“Do.” Harry tapped his shoulder with one fist and smiled. “He needs some humbling anyway, since he seems to think that he’s the best trainee in the Auror program.”
“Oh, Harry,” Hermione broke in then. It sounded as if she had been forcing herself to restrain her curiosity until he and Ron had somewhat made up the brewing argument between them. “There’s so much I want to know. What does compatible magic feel like? Why could you fight so well with Malfoy when you’d never fought next to him before? Magic alone shouldn’t do that. I think it would depend on personality, and you know how much your personalities have always clashed, and I don’t think your history…”
Harry caught Ron’s eye as Hermione rattled on, and they smiled wryly at each other. They all had their places in this friendship, and Hermione’s was to ask a million questions at once.
Harry was feeling happier than he had in the month since Auror training started, in fact, as if he were back in Hogwarts. He wondered for a moment if, since telling the truth about the compatible magic had made him this happy, if perhaps he ought to tell Ron and Hermione the truth about his nightmares and his fits, too.
He shook his head at once. The difference was that keeping his friendship with them was important, and the fits weren’t.
*
“I still wish you could come home more often, darling.”
Draco smiled reassuringly at his mother through the fire. Narcissa looked worn and anxious. Draco hoped that she wasn’t spending every day in such a state of stress. “You know that I can’t, Mother,” he said comfortably, shifting until he was sitting in front of the fire instead of kneeling. His legs ached after a hard day of Combat, and later this evening he was supposed to have one of his private duels with Potter. “I have to work, and when I’m at home, your conversation is so fascinating that I never do.”
His mother smiled, as he had meant her to do, and smoothed her hand down her hair. “How can I resent your absence when you make up for it with such charming words?” she murmured.
“I hope that you’ll never resent my absence,” Draco said honestly. His home was one of the few havens he had left in a world that he no longer understood, given his father’s imprisonment and his family’s loss of honor. Or perhaps I comprehend it too well, and do not wish to. “Instead, think of me as doing something that no Malfoy has ever done, and earning respect by it.”
Narcissa fixed him with a disconcerting gaze-disconcerting because it was direct and his mother had not given anyone such a direct look in months. “If I could only be sure that it would contribute it to your being happy as well as unique,” she murmured.
Draco blinked and then laughed. “I’m not always happy, Mother,” he admitted. “But no one is. I don’t think that you should worry about the fleeting moments of what I feel. Look towards my ultimate goals instead.”
Narcissa smiled, but it was a distant smile, and a few moments later, after an exchange of farewells, she ended the Floo call. Draco leaned back on his heels and spent a pleasant minute thinking of what the Aurors would say if they knew that Draco had easily worked around their spells designed to keep the Floo connections in the trainee rooms private so that he could communicate with his mother.
Then his satisfied smile faded into what he knew was a frown of annoyance.
He still had no idea what to do about Potter. It was obvious that his fits could not be allowed to continue, because they were linked now in the minds of their instructors. Portillo Lopez had been watching them with narrowed eyes, and Draco knew that she was wondering how well Potter’s magic, biased towards Healing, might work with his own. Ketchum had spoken briefly of pairing them together when they came to team tactics, but they were not there yet. Even Pushkin had watched them with elevated eyebrows, though how compatible magic might work with Observation, Draco had no idea.
And this morning, Gregory had made them fight each other in Combat.
Potter had struck with grim determination, mouth set in a thin line, as if he wanted to prove that part of him could still fight Draco-never mind how inferior his physical combat skills might be to his wandwork. Draco had won the fight, but not easily. What Potter lost in simple lack of coordination and those damn glasses slipping down his face, he made up for with sheer stubbornness and a high pain tolerance. When Draco had held out his hand to help him up, on Gregory’s orders, Potter had grunted and stood without looking Draco in the eye. He had limped away at once to sit beside Granger and Weasley. Weasley thumped Potter on the back and shook his head at Draco, as if scolding him for doing what he was actually supposed to do and inflicting pain on Potter.
Draco scowled and crossed his arms. Whatever Potter had said to Weasley, it might have redeemed him in the eyes of his unworthy friend, but it had set Weasley against Draco more firmly than ever.
And then there was the fact that Potter would have one of his fits again in public someday, and that would reflect badly on Draco, particularly if they lost a practice duel because of it.
It seemed to Draco that Potter was following his old procedure of plowing blindly forwards, ignoring all the evidence that might give him another perspective on the situation. He had accepted the compatible magic because he had no choice, but it was becoming only too clear that he wouldn’t accept anything beyond that. He didn’t ponder the implications. He didn’t think about what would happen if one of them did something to disgrace the other, and how their professors would think of them as a linked, marked pair, even if they tried consciously not to. The friendships that compatible magic formed were so deep and often so famous that it was impossible not to consider them as pairs.
And Draco knew, because Dearborn had told him so, that some of the instructors had the ambition to help in the formation of another pair of heroes.
His life could be wonderful. He might become famous. He might become admired. He might have an assigned partner before the end of his first year, where most of the other trainees had to wait until their third. He might be able to show everyone that, no matter what his name, he had the talent and the ambition to succeed at anything he did.
But that potential future depended on Potter, who seemed ill-disposed to embrace it. The mere thought made Draco want to grind his teeth. He rose and turned to pace his room, wondering if perhaps that would make him feel better.
Someone knocked on the door. Draco turned around with a sense of relief. That would be Potter, and Draco could translate his whirling thoughts into direct words.
But instead, when he opened it, he found a tall, narrow former Slytherin called Aurelius Kensing waiting with an awkwardly wrapped package in his hands. Draco stepped back warily, one hand on his wand. Kensing had left Hogwarts three years before Draco had, and he had been known for his pranks; he had even been daring enough to try them in Professor Snape’s class.
This time, though, Kensing just looked at him, a leisurely look from bright brown eyes, before he gave a small bow and handed the package over. “This is for you,” he said. “I saw the owl struggling and decided to take it away.”
Draco glanced automatically for some sign of a tear in the package, then reminded himself that Kensing was an expert at making things look untouched and he should trust to a spell that would let him detect hexes instead. “The owl didn’t wait for a reply?” he asked as he cast the spell nonverbally.
“No,” Kensing said. He seemed to be losing interest, though he had smiled briefly when he saw Draco’s wand move in the spell to detect hexes. No doubt he recognized it. “I don’t know who it was from, but I didn’t find any Dark Arts on it. You know the list of items that first-year trainees are forbidden to have in the rooms?” His voice was stern, and Draco wondered if he really cared about the list of rules or not.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “You’re more likely to break those rules than I am.”
Kensing just gave him a lazy smile, as if to say that it was completely appropriate for Draco to bring up ancient history but he would remember it, and turned and strolled away. Draco watched after him to make sure he turned the corner before he shut the door and set the package down on the table in the center of the room. It was heavy; he thought it was made of metal.
He took a good few steps back and cast an unwrapping spell that his mother had taught him, useful for opening packages and for disabling any nasty surprises that unwanted or unexpected gifts might bring.
The package’s paper fell apart. Draco was not sure what he expected, but it wasn’t what revealed itself.
The Pensieve that now sat in the middle of his table was filled to the brim with liquid silvery memories. They must have been charmed to keep them from spilling; Draco had no illusion that they would have survived a ride with an owl otherwise. He walked around the table carefully, staring, but there was no mark that identified the Pensieve. He would have thought it was a gift his mother had sent him, but she would have mentioned it, and she would have sent it empty.
No, wait. There was a single mark close to the rim of the Pensieve on the side that Draco was now facing, since he had walked halfway around it. He took a step closer and bent down so he could see it more clearly. It was an engraving, and hard to make out at first against the bright silver.
Property of Severus Snape.
Draco swallowed, and his eyes traveled slowly from the words up to the memories that looked ready to spill over the rim. Then he took a step back, instinctively putting some distance between him and the dangerous gift.
Professor Snape was dead, of course. Draco had visited the Shrieking Shack and tried a few spells on the body just to make sure. He’d even experimented with a bezoar, though he’d never heard it was effective against the bloody wounds from a giant snake he was sure had destroyed his Head of House as much as the poison had.
But he could have arranged to send this Pensieve to Draco before his death, specifying that it should be delivered at a certain time.
Today was Halloween. Draco had never known that was a day of special significance to Snape.
Hesitantly, he approached the Pensieve until he stood staring down into it. Of course he could see nothing in the memories clearly when he was looking at them from the outside like this. Taunting colors and glimpses of shapes danced beneath the surface, but he knew that his eyes and brain were the ones forming patterns in them.
He wanted to plunge his head into the memories, and he did not want to. He knew something of Snape’s story now. It was sure to be a harrowing one.
Another knock on the door, and this one had the arrogance that Draco expected of Potter. He conjured a dark cloth big enough to enfold the Pensieve and cast it over the thing. Potter would be curious, but with Draco in the same room, he would not intrude.
Potter strode through the door when Draco opened it and gave him a brisk nod. “I thought we would go back to practicing with the Patronus Charm again,” he said.
Draco, about to answer, narrowed his eyes. “How strange,” he said. “I was sure we would duel.” They had done that for the past fortnight, since the day in Dearborn’s class when they’d been forced to reveal the compatible magic.
“Well, today I don’t feel like it.” Potter faced him and lifted his chin, folding his arms. Draco sneered at him.
“Why? Did Weasley issue you some injunction telling you that you’re not allowed to duel with me anymore?’ Draco took a step closer, watching Potter’s face, ready to pounce if it turned out that he was right. The thought of Weasley daring to interfere with him infuriated him more than usual.
“There’s another reason,” Potter said instead of snapping, though he had flushed bright red at Draco’s words. “One that doesn’t concern you and that you don’t need to know about.” He lifted his wand and cocked an eyebrow impatiently at Draco. “Are you going to ever learn to do the Patronus Charm properly?”
Draco considered pressing forwards. Potter’s lips were tight, his eyes too brilliant. He looked over Draco’s shoulder and at the far wall as if he would prefer to tutor it.
In fact, he looked the way he had after his fit in Combat.
Draco made a decision not to press. Potter would refuse to discuss it, and they would waste the lesson. Perhaps, in time, Potter would remember his forbearance kindly, especially since his friends would probably try to get to the bottom of his fits sooner or later.
“All right,” he said, and closed his eyes to concentrate on his happy memory.
He didn’t close them all the way, however, and so had them open enough to see Potter’s look of surprise and suspicion and speculation-dancing, bright emotions that had deeper roots than Potter knew.
Draco smiled, and began to conjure his Patronus.
Chapter Eight.