Chapter Twenty-Five of 'Seasons of War'- United

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Twenty-Four.

Title: Seasons of War (25/40)
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.

Thanks again for all the reviews!

Chapter Twenty-Five-United

Harry was aware of eyes on him when he walked into his class with Weston and Lowell by himself, and for unusual reasons as well as the usual ones. He acted as though he didn’t see the stares, at least as best he could when he didn’t know what Robards and Holder had told anyone yet, and took his regular place in the forming circle.

“Where is your partner, Trainee Potter?” Weston looked at him with narrowed eyes, leaning against air. Lowell, behind her, was talking with Herricks. Harry had no doubt that Lowell was listening to the conversation despite the fact that he was apparently focused on something else. Weston and Lowell were a pair; what one knew, the other did.

“Sick,” Harry said. “Because of rumors that you may have heard.” He thought the insinuation should be safe either way. If Robards and Holder had said nothing yet, they would soon; if they had started to spread rumors, then Harry would be covered.

Lowell jerked a little, but his voice in the running monologue to Herricks remained calm. Weston shrugged and stood straighter. “You’ll be unable to participate in most of the exercises we’ve chosen for today.”

“I know that,” Harry said, and stared at her until she looked away and began speaking with some of the other partnerships.

Ron worked his way around the circle, necessarily tugging Hermione with him, until he stood next to Harry. Hermione attended to Weston’s lecture with annoyance seeming to bristle off her while Ron whispered to Harry in an undertone, “How is he, mate?”

“Not used to it yet,” Harry said. He flashed Ron a brief smile. It wasn’t as though Ron had any particular reason to care about Draco, except that he was Harry’s boyfriend and partner. “Would you be?”

Ron grimaced and scratched the back of his neck, then straightened up and nodded so that he could pretend he’d been paying attention to Weston’s advice. When he turned back to Harry, his face was grim. “Do they know what happened to his eye? I’d hate to think of it ending up the way Moody’s did, or worse.”

Harry shuddered. The memory of Moody’s magical eye stuck in Umbridge’s door was hardly one of his worst memories of the war, but he thought it might become so now that Draco had lost one. “They don’t know yet,” he said. “I think it’s one of the things that Portillo Lopez and Raverat are working to find out.”

Ron probably would have asked another question, but Weston called out for him and Hermione to demonstrate a technique at that moment, and they had to shuffle into the middle of the circle. Ron shuffled, at least; Hermione walked as though someone had stuck a poker up her arse. Harry reckoned that she didn’t think the wounding of someone else in the comitatus a sufficient excuse for not paying attention in class.

“Can he still lead us?”

Apparently, it was Harry’s fate not to be able to learn what Weston and Lowell were teaching that day. He blinked and turned to Ventus. She rarely approached him outside the comitatus, but it made sense that she would want to know now. In fact, Harry was surprised that she hadn’t visited Draco yet. Perhaps it was a touch of sensitivity or (more likely, knowing Ventus) she wanted the answer only to her question and not anything else that Draco might be able to tell her.

“I think so,” Harry said. He kept one eye on the back of Weston’s head, which often seemed to spasm before she turned around and pinned you with a deadly stare for talking in her class. “He’s not-not himself, yet, obviously, but he has the will and the strength to survive something like this and pull himself back together.”

“But the loss of an eye will damage his ability in battle.” That was Herricks, behind Ventus. He had picked up Weston’s trick of leaning against thin air and did it now as he studied Harry with an intense frown. “Can he retain the leadership of the comitatus? He might want to, but whether he could do it in such a way that he benefits us is another question.”

Harry bit the inside of his cheek in a way that he hoped would keep him from shouting. He had never cared as much about Herricks as Draco did, but at the moment, he could see how one might dislike him.

“I don’t know yet,” he said, because it was the only answer he could give that was true to Draco but would keep Herricks from arguing. “Yes, he lost the eye. That doesn’t mean that he lost all knowledge of how to fight along with it. And I don’t know how high the war is on his list of priorities right now.” High, perhaps, with the need to get revenge on Nihil. But Harry was not about to tell something so private to other people.

“He’ll win and survive and come through,” said Ventus, with the comfortable assurance that Harry had seen in her before. Sometimes he thought she willed her own reality into being, by being so confident that she simply refused to accept anything else. “Some of the greatest generals in the past have been wounded by Dark curses and still struggled on. You must remember Mad-Eye Moody.” She turned to Herricks with a faint smile, inviting him to agree with her. Harry wondered what would happen if someone disagreed with her when she looked like that. He might be interested in finding out, but only if he could stand some distance away.

“Yes, he might,” Herricks said. “But coming through doesn’t help a lot when we have a war to fight now, does it?” His gaze was cold and intense as he leaned towards Harry. “You tell him that it’s not shameful to lean on others and delegate some tasks to other people.”

“I’ll tell him,” Harry said, lying, for the first time, without a telltale stammer or his face turning red. He disliked Herricks enough at the moment that the lie sprang more naturally to his lips than the truth.

Herricks started to say something else, but two things happened that prevented him: Weston swung around and glared, and Holder strode through the ragged circle of trainees into the center.

All attention focused on her. Harry decided, later, that that must have really irritated Weston, since it was the moment she had probably counted on launching some blistering admonition about paying attention in her class.

Weston and Lowell came to attention. The trainees scrambled closer together and tried to stand up as straight as veteran soldiers. Ventus stared thoughtfully, her hand falling down to her wand. Hermione jerked nervously, as though her secrets were written on her face. Ron, Harry noticed, was the only one who had an uncomplicated reaction. He would have liked to pound Holder into the ground with his fists, and he didn’t care if she knew it.

Harry wasn’t sure what his own face looked like, but Holder seemed to have anticipated any reaction. When she turned in a slow circle and caught sight of him, she nodded judiciously and beckoned with one finger. Harry’s face flamed, but he walked towards her. If she tried to humiliate him in public, he would probably have to go along with it, at least as long as it was part of the cover-up for Draco’s injury.

And would I be able to perceive in time that it’s not?

When he stopped in front of her, Holder looked him up and down as if she had expected to find more meat on his bones. Then she said in a soft but carrying voice, “You may tell your partner, Trainee Potter, that his sacrifice shall not go unrewarded.”

Harry took a deep breath. He had to make a guess about how to react, and he wished Draco was at his side to make it more certain. “Will you be able to give him a new eye, ma’am? Or don’t you know yet?”

“The sacrifices themselves may be mentioned in public,” Holder said. “I think the rewards a matter for privacy.” She laid a hand on Harry’s arm, and Harry was so shocked that he nearly forgot to notice how cold and thin her fingers were. “But know that we are proud of you. No one has done more in the war than you have.”

She stalked off the same way she had come, cloak flying behind her like a banner. Most people stared. A few more edged away from Harry as if Holder’s favor was a catching disease.

“What did she mean?” Herricks demanded.

“Perhaps you would have some idea if you ever listened for the meanings of words, Trainee Herricks,” Weston said.

Harry started to grin, because he could feel the strength of her desire to say that from here. But then Weston turned around and gave him a remote look, and Harry winced and stepped back. He knew the next words out of her mouth would be as devastating, but this time, they would be aimed at him.

Lowell touched Weston’s arm and shook his head.

Weston didn’t turn to look at him, but by this time, Harry knew that didn’t mean anything. She studied Harry in a moment of long, posed silence instead, then turned away and said in cold tones, “Everyone should come nearer the center of the ring and listen carefully to our instructions. We will not repeat them.”

Harry was glad to crowd around with the others. He didn’t yet know what the consequences of Holder’s actions, and his, would be; he hoped that Draco was able to live with them. Harry had thought he could survive almost anything, but Draco seemed more fragile to him, now.

*

“I want to know what kind of trap you laid.”

Nemo had been asleep when Draco and Raverat had come into the tent where he was being held, but he snapped awake at the words, quivering. Draco stood staring down at him and wondering how much of the wards and enchantments that held him were really strange and how many were simply distorted by the sight of his single eye.

Silver chains linked Nemo’s wrists, so light that he probably couldn’t feel them, but Draco saw the thorns coming out of the cuffs. A heavy pair of iron blocks encased his feet. Blue light hummed around his head. There was also a stifling presence in the tent, like incense, that Draco couldn’t see. He thought that was probably the spell Gregory had discovered that would cut off contact between a Dark Lord and his followers.

“I don’t have to answer to someone like you.” Nemo’s voice had no strength, and his nose twitched like a rabbit’s.

Draco crouched down in front of him. He had no fear of falling over and looking ridiculous, although his legs had begun to tremble with the exertion of squatting like this almost the moment he did it. He thought he was still not fully recovered from the beast’s attack. But what he felt at the moment was sharp and cold and focused. He would get answers out of Nemo, and he didn’t care what it took to get them.

“I’m sure you don’t,” he said. “But you’re going to.” He glanced at Raverat, who simply studied Nemo grimly and gave him no help. Draco decided that he could risk one of the spells he wanted to use. He took up his wand and aimed it at a bare patch of skin on Nemo’s leg, above where the iron block ended.

Nemo leaped and cried out in agony as Draco’s spell took effect. He tried to reach down and scratch the exposed patch of skin, but the chains prevented his hands from getting near it. He twisted around and stared at Draco, his nose twitching in panic and his eyes darting from side to side.

“What did you do?” he whispered. “I can feel beast magic of any kind. What did you set on me?”

Draco gave him a serene smile. “It hurts, doesn’t it?” he asked, not answering otherwise. The spell didn’t really implant a burrowing insect under someone’s skin. It only felt like it. But the pain and the burning and the itch would grow until the caster took the spell off. Draco didn’t think it was as brutal as some of the torture that Gregory would have inflicted on Nemo. That didn’t matter, given how annoying the sensation could be and how it would baffle Nemo by intruding on his area of expertise.

Nemo twisted, trying vainly to turn the leg so that he could see it. “I demand that you stop this,” he said. “I demand that you release me.”

“Of course you do,” Draco said, and bounced his wand in his hand, and smiled.

“What do you want?” Nemo bowed his head and shuffled in a cramped circle, trying to hitch the leg up so that it would reach his chains and scratch itself. Draco laughed. Nemo heard him and froze, shoulders hunched and shaking. “What do you want?” he repeated in a lower voice. “I don’t know what Nihil might have done now that I’m not with him. I keep telling you that. You don’t listen. I don’t know.”

“I want to know what kind of beast has bony claws and lights of eyes that fill the darkness with fire,” Draco said.

Nemo turned his head towards him. His face held more intelligence than it had a moment ago, though ripples running beneath the surface indicated that Draco’s spell was still functioning. “I won’t tell you,” he said.

Draco shrugged and cast the spell again, this time on an unguarded patch of skin on the back of Nemo’s hand. It hurt even more there, or so his father had assured him. Nemo rubbed his hand furiously on the floor.

“More of that until you tell me,” Draco said.

Raverat made a little noise in the back of his throat. Draco glanced at him curiously. If he had thought the man would be trouble, he would never have brought him along. He had made the suggestion and led the way, and hadn’t left yet, so Draco had assumed that he could stand torture. Instead, his eyes were fastened on Nemo’s body as thought he had never seen anything so horrifying.

“I don’t know,” Nemo said, and his voice rose into a wail. “You can’t make me. Why is this so hard for you to understand? I’m a part of Nihil, and I obey only him. I can’t tell you what he won’t allow me to tell you.”

Draco didn’t believe that for an instant, since Nemo’s refusals up until that point had been a matter of willful denial. He cast the spell on Nemo’s cheek, and Nemo screamed this time. Draco smiled. He didn’t think the spell that bad. What it did was trap Nemo in a cycle of pain that he couldn’t escape by ordinary measures, and Nemo was part of Nihil. Pain that he couldn’t escape frightened and enraged him as nothing else did, given the experience of part of him under the hands of Death Eater torturers.

“No! No! No!” Nemo was flailing about, and Draco would have been worried that someone else would hear his cries, but he had checked the silencing wards on the tent when they came in. “You can’t-what is it? You have to get them out! You have to leave me alone!”

“I know that you can tell me the name of the beast, if you want to,” Draco said. “You’re the one who would know, since you raised them for Nihil. And you’re cut off from him. He won’t know if you tell me.”

Nemo’s screams filled the silence between them, and nothing else. Draco thought he would succumb eventually. He leaned back on his heels and waited, turning his head from side to side so that he could get a sense of the whole tent. He hated the restriction of his peripheral vision that happened with one eye gone.

“Must you be so cold?” Raverat whispered.

Draco looked at him. “What?” Perhaps the expression on Raverat’s face was part of the distortion, too, but Draco didn’t think so.

“The others at least appeared grim or determined,” Raverat whispered. “You look as though you enjoy what you’re doing to him.”

Draco shook his head. “I’m enjoying my revenge on the only part of Nihil that I can reach right now, and Nihil is responsible for my condition. I do want the answers to those questions, yes, but that’s a secondary concern.” He sneered then. “Unless you’re going to tell me that I should waste sympathy on someone who would do this to me.” He gestured angrily at his face.

Raverat looked stern and grave, as though he knew the answer he wanted to give was not the one Draco wanted to hear. But Nemo responded, not seeming to know when it would do him best to keep silent. “That wasn’t the plan! We were supposed to kill you, not only steal an eye!”

Raverat turned rapidly towards Nemo. Draco didn’t. He thought such movement would only startle the idiot into keeping his mouth shut after all. “Really?” he asked, as if bored. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t believe you.”

“No!” Nemo ducked his head and apparently attempted to rub his cheek against the chains. “You have to believe me. We meant to kill you. You’ve been a nuisance to us long enough, you and that partner of yours. The trap was meant to spring when you were together in the presence of someone who could be blamed.”

Now we’re getting somewhere, Draco thought, closing his eye. He didn’t know if the pain or his own delusions had prompted Nemo to respond, and as long as it sounded like truth, he wasn’t going to question it. “That’s a trap that I’d thought beyond your abilities,” he said, lacing cool contempt and grudging respect together in his voice. “You’ve surprised me, Nemo. Perhaps you’ll surprise me again.” He paused just long enough to let Nemo’s hopes rise, and then finished, “But I don’t think so.”

“No!” This was a full-throated cry of agony, and Nemo was scrubbing his cheek so hard against his shoulder that it had started to bleed. “Really! I just tied the trap with the beast’s name and nature, and the beast was the one who would sense when it was needed. Not me at all.” He smiled pathetically at Draco. “I know I’m not the smartest. That means that you need to believe me, and stop them!”

Draco opened his mouth to ask what Nemo meant by “them,” and then smiled thinly. Of course. Nemo still believed the itching arose from insects rather than a spell. He had probably worked with beasts so long that he preferred to attribute any magical effect to them rather than to reality. “I might,” he said. “If you give me more.”

Nemo froze for a moment. Then he jerked his head and began to babble. “Yes, yes, why not? You know the most important things already. The beast was supposed to kill you. The eye was an accident.” His voice sank. “Not that he won’t find some way to use it. You know that he will.”

“Yes, perhaps he will,” Draco said, and showed as much indifference as he could. “What is the name of this beast?”

Nemo said something that sounded like a kitten gagging on a mouthful of rotten porridge. Draco raised his eyebrow. “The English name?”

“I don’t know if it has one,” said Nemo. Again, for a moment, he looked calm and regal as he considered his area of expertise, though the image was undercut by the way that he tried to scratch his legs with his bound hands. “I would call it the Dark Argus, perhaps, because of the hundred eyes.”

Draco nodded. The reference made sense, and that was as much as he expected from Nemo right now. “Is it sturdy? Can it be killed? What harms it?”

Nemo twisted towards him and stared with narrowed eyes. Draco felt Raverat touch his shoulder. He shrugged in irritation. The touch had come from his blind side, and Nemo was reacting so well that Draco had nearly started to forget the loss of his eye. He could have cursed Raverat for reminding him.

“You will not kill the Dark Argus,” Nemo said in a thick, eerie voice, as if pronouncing a prophecy. “You cannot. You will not. You dare not.”

Shit. Draco knew he should have trod more carefully, and that this particular danger was no one’s fault but his own. He knew how protective of his beasts Nemo was. Of course a question about its vulnerabilities would lead him to rise above whatever pain he might be experiencing at the moment and fight for it.

But showing his knowledge of all that would be worse than stupid. So Draco stared, arms looped around his knees, and let his face reflect nothing but boredom and contempt. “Certainly I won’t,” he said. “It will probably die now that you’re no longer at Nihil’s side to feed it, anyway. I know that the beasts don’t last long without someone to tell them what to do, and I don’t think Nihil’s as good at it as you are.”

Nemo’s face had a complicated expression on it, one formed of combined outrage and flattery. “You dare not,” he whispered, and then shook his head. “But why am I concerned? You cannot kill the Dark Argus. It has no vulnerabilities.”

“Including being fed the improper food and choking to death on it, the way Nihil will probably make it do?” Draco asked brightly.

“Its mouths are like steel,” Nemo said. “Its stomachs are like steel. It perfectly obeys him. There is no way that you can kill it.” He sounded now as if he was talking to himself, and his fingers flexed nervously in the air, no longer scratching. “It is the beast that was meant and summoned and made to last.”

This was also getting somewhere, although Draco didn’t know how many details he would be able to fetch out of that morass Nemo called his mind. He shrugged. “It can’t have been that hard to summon, if someone else can control it.”

“Do you know how long I spent collecting owl feathers and kneeling among the bones that I found in the south of Wiltshire?” Nemo demanded. “If you think that you could do it yourself, you are more than welcome to try.”

Wiltshire, again. Draco had assumed, when he heard last year that Nihil had often appeared in Wiltshire, and when he battled him there, that it had something to do with the shade of his father that had taken up residence in the Manor. But this was more likely, that there had been some creature there Nemo needed to spend time digging up and researching.

Raverat shifted beside him, as if even the mention of necromancy was enough to make him want to hurt Nemo. It recalled Draco to himself. He thought Harry would come back to the tent soon, and he didn’t want to remain here. He stood up. “Perhaps I’ll summon a Dark Argus myself,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll kill it. Who knows?”

Nemo gave a number of outraged cries that blended with sounds of pain as the itching returned to his consciousness. Draco smiled and walked out without lifting the spells. He didn’t want Nemo to realize that he’d told Draco anything important and connect it to the relief he’d been granted from the torture.

Raverat came behind him. He gave Draco several troubled glances, which Draco felt more than saw. Finally, Draco turned to him, rolled his eye, paused a moment to think about how pathetic that gesture would look with a single eye, and then demanded, “What is it?”

“You are colder than I thought you were,” Raverat responded.

It was all he would say no matter how much Draco questioned him, so Draco gave up and returned to the tent.

Where Holder was waiting for them.

Chapter Twenty-Six.

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