Chapter Seventeen of 'Seasons of War'- Up Against the Barriers
Chapter Sixteen.
Title: Seasons of War (17/?)
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 Seventeen-Up Against the Barriers
“Sir?”
Ketchum looked up at Harry and smiled a little, as though he thought Harry was going to ask him a question he could laugh at. “Yes?” he asked, and gestured with his wand towards a small clump of grass. It vanished. Harry swallowed and then told himself it was ridiculous to be nervous. Ketchum wouldn’t make him vanish that way for bringing up a subject that he had been the first one to mention the existence of.
Harry thought.
“Is it true that there’s a group of Aurors who want to help us?” he asked. “Who are they?”
Ketchum exploded a small stone before he cocked his head in Harry’s direction and studied him with interest. “Have you decided that you would rather work with us than against us, then?” he asked. “I know many others outside our small group who would be interested in that news.”
Harry licked his lips and remembered the things Draco had told him as they lay sleepily curled around each other in their bed that morning before dawn and planned. “We’re only interested in that if the people involved want to work with us, rather than order us around,” he said. “We’ve almost died several times, but those dangers were part of the ignorance that you tried to keep us in as much as anything else.”
Ketchum smiled again instead of getting offended. “That’s a fair point. I think the problem is that we haven’t had to deal with trainees like you before, the products of a war. During the first war with You-Know-Who, trainees were firmly segregated and not allowed to participate, and they didn’t accept any new trainees as long as the war was going on. But here, we have some, like you, who are going from one war to another. We should listen to your experience more often.” He let the smile drop. “Not that you don’t take some chances you would better leave alone.”
Harry was so heartened that Ketchum was making sense that he grinned giddily at him and decided to ignore the slightly dangerous tone in his voice. “I know, sir. Draco’s spoken to me about that, and I’m going to try and use my life more wisely in the future. But for now, we’ve learned something that this group of Aurors should know about. Can we arrange a meeting where you’re sure that no one would betray us?”
“I think so.” Ketchum tossed up and then caught his wand, frowning into the distance. “I’ll need several hours.”
“It doesn’t have to be today,” Harry said, blinking. He was so used to delays from the Aurors that he had assumed this would be another case of it, with the meeting not happening for several days or perhaps a week.
“But it should,” Ketchum said. “At least, if this information is as important as you claim it is.”
Harry shrugged a little. “It’s the reason that Nihil hasn’t tried to attack us for the last few months,” he said. “He’s been distracted by something else. And it’s certainly a fact that he would try to attack us and kill us over, to destroy the knowledge, if he knew that we had it.”
“Your methods of information-collecting get more and more mysterious every time,” Ketchum murmured, with a shake of his head. “Very well. The meeting will be at seven tonight. You’re to come to my tent, as silently and as separately as you can.”
Harry nodded, and headed off to spread the word to Ron, Hermione, Ventus, and Herricks. Draco had something else to attend to at the moment.
*
“And every word that you speak to me, Trainee Malfoy, is the truth?” Holder liked to put “trainee” in front of his name every time she spoke it, as if to remind Draco of the place that she wanted him to occupy.
“Yes, madam,” Draco said, bowing and then straightening up and smiling at her. And what he’d told her was the truth. Ventus and Herricks were working together more and more smoothly. Harry was paying more attention to his studies. Granger was researching Nihil and attempting to learn more about him, something that one could say had been true from the first day she learned about him.
Holder paced back and forth in front of Robards. Robards hadn’t moved or showed emotion since Draco had started making his report; Draco wasn’t even sure he’d blinked. He sat there with his eyes fixed on Draco’s face like a lizard’s and now and then seemed to breathe. Holder was the one he was meant to pay attention to, Draco was sure, but he couldn’t discount Robards, the brain that heard all this information and made the decisions as to what Holder would do.
“It does not seem like much,” Holder said, and then turned around and leveled her wand at Draco.
Draco already had his wand up in front of him. There was no way that she was going to do to him what she’d done to Harry, and force him to reveal his secrets. If she cast the spell, he already had a countercurse in mind.
“Enough, Alice,” Robards said, before anything could happen. Draco was aware of a vague regret, but he also felt relieved. He would prefer not to test his magic against Holder’s right now. When he attacked her, he wanted his strength and quickness to come as a surprise. “We don’t need to cast against him. Perhaps Trainee Malfoy himself would like to explain why his report is so inadequate.” He leaned forwards now and stared at Draco, the pressure of the stare like stone against Draco’s composure.
“Inadequate in what way?” Draco didn’t need to feign his surprise. If Granger and Weasley were doing other, noticeable things, he didn’t know about them, which meant they had hidden them fairly well-better than he would have thought Gryffindors could. “Have you heard something that contradicts what I told you, sir?”
“He means that there are more things happening in the brains of those we assigned you to than you have told us,” Holder said. Draco was watching, though, and saw a single irritated blink from Robards, which he thought meant the Head Auror would have preferred it if she hadn’t taken over the conversation at that moment. “What of the conflicts and the rumors of conflicts? What of anyone who has managed to discard their oaths? What of anyone who has spoken of wanting to leave the Aurors?”
“I haven’t heard any of that,” Draco said. “I can only tell you what I heard. And if you want someone able to spy on all sorts of people in the camp, you chose your spy poorly. Most of the trainees won’t speak to me. They’re either envious of my skill or fearful of my name.” That was true, and Holder seemed to know it, given the golden sparks that flew from the end of her wand a moment later.
“Potter must be planning rebellion,” Robards said quietly. “It is what he does. And yet, you did not report that.”
Draco sighed and met Robards’s eyes with finely crafted (if he did say so himself) impatience. “Once again, sir, I can only report what I heard. How is it that my partner and lover managed to keep something from me which your other spies heard about? He isn’t a good liar. I venture to say that anything else you heard is more rumors, again planted by people who are jealous of him or me or both of us at once. He isn’t plotting rebellion. He would have to have other people to plot with, and he would certainly have asked me.”
“Then the fault lies in your honesty,” Holder said, and stole towards him like a cobra.
“Or your paranoia,” Draco retorted. He turned to Robards again. “Do you really think that everyone in the camp is plotting against you, sir? Why? We know that we have to stay among the Aurors if we’re to survive. Nihil would kill us if we went out on our own.” Unless we were clever enough to stay away from Nihil himself, which it seems most of the trainees aren’t.
Robards and Holder exchanged a long, level glance. Then Robards said, “Trainee Malfoy, your role in this campaign is limited. You will not accuse us of inadequacy. You are to redouble your efforts and report as often as you can, to Alice herself if you cannot reach me.”
Draco bowed, but his ears were quick, and his cowed demeanor an act. He had heard the one word Robards had used, the slip that Draco thought he hadn’t noticed but also hadn’t meant to make, and he burned with excitement.
Campaign.
There was no reason to assume that Robards and Holder thought they were fighting everyone in the camp. Their animosity so far had seemed to concentrate on Harry and Draco. But they might be thinking of the war against Nihil as a campaign, and a grander one than sitting about in tents while the trainees trained would imply.
They must have begun hunting Nihil in earnest, and perhaps planning with the War Wizards for the time when they’ll finally destroy him. What else could it be?
Then Draco frowned. He would have to restrain those conclusions that he wanted to leap to. Yes, it seemed likely that Robards and Holder and the rest of the Aurors who thought themselves above talking to mere trainees would plan to attack Nihil themselves, but Draco had no idea whether those plans were being made, or put into motion, or only discussed. He couldn’t act on something that didn’t have any basis but one slip.
But he might be able to use the knowledge. As he bowed to Robards and Holder and left the tent after a few more threats, he wondered whether the Aurors they were hopefully meeting soon would know anything about this.
*
“I’m still having the dreams.”
Harry winced and leaned back in his chair to study Hermione’s face. She was pale, and her hand shook when she put a cup of tea down on the table in the center of the tent she shared with Ron. When she leaned back in turn, Harry could see that she was swallowing continually. He didn’t think that came merely from drinking the tea.
“I’m sorry,” Harry said. “The Occlumency doesn’t work, then?”
Hermione shook her head. “I think it holds some of them at bay-the less insistent ones. I’m not dreaming about being held in darkness anymore. But I still dream about him splitting up my body and using the bones to build something, and now there’s a new one, where I’m in a series of marble halls while he’s hunting me. It’s a huge building, and I run through it certain that I have to find someone who would be able to help me, but there are just walls and corridors and arched doorways with no doors in them. And echoes,” she added with what Harry thought was special bitterness. “Echoes that reply to my voice, but whenever I follow them, they’re only my words.”
Harry hugged her, because he didn’t know what else to do. Hermione lowered her head and closed her eyes. Harry stood there like that for a little while with his arms around her and then murmured, “What do you think of Draco’s proposal that you do research so that we don’t have to take as many risks when we’re fighting Nihil? Research balls of nothingness? And what about researching bone magic? That might at least give you a chance to feel like you’re controlling the dreams. And if you’re conscious enough that they’re dreams, maybe you would be able to use that knowledge against him.”
“I’ll try it,” Hermione said, and then sighed into his neck. “I think I would have done it before, but the books I looked in had nothing about the nightmares. Maybe I should treat the dreams as if they were real, for now. I have no idea what Nihil could be building, but then again, we have no idea about most of the things he does.”
“And any little bit of information about him can help, for that reason.” Harry pulled back and smiled at her. “Is there anything I can do?”
Hermione hesitated for a moment, her hand skimming across the table and seeming as if it were reaching for a parchment or book that wasn’t there. “How did you put up with the visions that you got from Voldemort?” she asked at last, not looking at him. “You knew the visions were coming from him, and you knew what they were. You had to see people die or get tortured. At least that’s a bit of protection for me, because I don’t think Nihil is targeting me specifically, and there’s no death or torture.”
“Except of you,” Harry pointed out quietly. “I think that would be worse, because I didn’t see myself dying in those dreams.”
Hermione gave him a faint smile. “I think both you and I would rather see ourselves die than other people.”
Harry paused, then had to nod, even though that meant he was shite at comforting her. That was the thing Draco didn’t understand but Harry thought most Gryffindors did. If something happened to you, you could fight it or make decisions about it. If it happened to someone else, then you couldn’t. You could only stand by helplessly, particularly if it happened far away or in a vision. You wanted to take action, but there was no one to tell you what the right action would be.
So you did something, just to relieve the tension. Harry had dashed off to help Sirius because it was better than doing nothing.
“I’ll try to look for more information on bones and the machines or weapons you can build with them,” Hermione said softly. “There are books the Aurors rescued from the Ministry that we don’t have access to. But I know ways that I could get access.” She chewed her lip for a moment, forehead wrinkling. “And the balls of nothingness. I don’t know how I would research them, but…” And this time her hand really was searching for parchment or books, Harry thought. He pushed the nearest scrap of paper towards her while her other hand seized a quill and she bent her head down and started to write.
Harry watched her and wished he could take the dreams away. It really was better to have something happening to you rather than to another person. He didn’t have a clue what he could do about Hermione’s dreams, but he would willingly have suffered them.
In the end, he stole away with a pat on her shoulder. He’d thought she was too deep in the writing to notice, but she did reach up and squeeze his hand briefly. Harry decided that was the best he could do for right now.
*
“I take it that most of our members aren’t a surprise to you.”
Draco nodded and kept a bored expression on his face, though, in reality, two of the faces who were part of the group had surprised him. He had expected Ketchum, since he was the one who had spoken to Harry about this supposed group of Aurors in the first place, and Weston and Lowell, since they had worked closely with him and Harry and might be able to see their superiority to ordinary trainees. And Portillo Lopez and Gregory would not have been surprises if he had known they were in conversation with Ketchum rather than acting on their own.
But he would have said Hestia Jones was too nervous to defy Robards and Holder like this. Still, there she sat, among the others in the circle of light wooden chairs, biting her lip and looking as if she would rather be anywhere else most of the time. Then a look of defiance would come over her face and she would lean forwards with her hands braced on her knees as though daring anyone to chase her out.
Beside her there was a young Auror who Draco thought vaguely was a Seer of some kind, simply from his distant, abstracted gaze and the crystal that hung on a chain around his neck. He had a shock of dark hair, pale grey eyes that reminded Draco of his father’s, and long, pale hands that played continually around each other like gamboling spiders. He caught Draco watching him and smiled.
Draco didn’t smile back. He thought one of Nihil’s living dead would give a smile like that.
“This is Auror Leonard Raverat,” said Ketchum, and he had a note of pride in his voice that Draco understood only when he continued. “He’s a traditionalist, but he has agreed to be our spy inside the Ministry. And he has moments of genuine prophecy.”
Raverat made a dismissive motion with his hand. “The moments of prophecy are few and far between, Samwise. You know that I study Divination mostly to clear my mind and because I find the meditations congenial, not because I can use it.”
Draco’s opinion of him improved mildly. If Raverat wasn’t going to behave like Trelawney, Draco thought they could work with him.
“I know, but every advantage we have on our side is a good one.” Ketchum turned to face the comitatus, which sat on a group of chairs facing the Aurors, with one of those abrupt movements Draco thought Muggleborns all used. Granger did it, too. “All right. Where do we begin? What have you discovered?”
Draco had assumed that he would speak for the comitatus, but Harry leaned forwards and caught his eye. Draco understood. As the one who had discovered the ball of nothingness and the source of it, Harry thought he should be the one to speak.
Draco couldn’t really dispute that, but he hoped Harry would keep in mind that the Aurors had yet to make any transaction of equal value. He nodded, and Harry beamed and started talking.
“We used incantations that would allow us to read the memory of objects, and went to places where we suspected Nihil might have been.”
“How did you learn that?” Raverat asked the question in a gentle voice, but Draco could see the eager flame come alight in his eyes. He was the one in the group who would probably ask the most probing questions, and Draco didn’t think that he was looking forward to working with him. He kept a warning expression on his face, ready in case Harry looked sideways for guidance.
But Harry seemed to know all by himself that he shouldn’t tell Raverat everything. He simply smiled and went on. “We found that he had left behind a small black ball of something that hovered in the air and which it was hard to focus on. A ball of pure nothingness. In at least one place, he achieved part of what he wants, which is to reduce the world to nothingness.”
“Why?” Jones was frowning and chewing fiercely on a piece of her hair. “Why should he want that? If he did that, then he wouldn’t be able to conquer the world and subject us to slavery.”
“Look at his name,” Draco said softly. “He didn’t call himself after the Latin word for power, or slavery, or victory. Instead, he chose nothing. And his distinguishing characteristic is that he can die and yet return, and the people he possesses become little more than buds or sacks full of him, losing themselves. He can’t die. He can’t escape. But he named himself after the thing that lies beyond all death and all escape. We think that he wants to die to escape the memories that made him what he is, and the only way he sees to do that is to get rid of every body and every piece of matter, so he can’t reincarnate.”
“That is a very interesting idea,” Raverat said in a way that indicated his attention had been caught. “One wonders if he could have chosen another solution and what would happen if someone suggested one to him.”
“I’m not in the business of offering solutions like that to him.” Gregory’s voice was fierce, her eyes brighter than Raverat’s. “Why should I offer that to someone who tried to make the rest of you see me as a traitor, and tried to kill me, and did kill many of the people who were fighting with me?”
Raverat held up a hand. “Forgive me, Astraea.” Draco stared; he hadn’t thought anyone would dare to call Gregory by her first name. “I was interested in the philosophical side of the question, and I neglected to think about the practical one.”
Draco was glad to see skeptical expressions appear on Lowell and Weston’s faces. They didn’t think that Raverat should have wandered away into philosophy. Well, neither did Draco, and he hoped that the man wouldn’t do it regularly.
“This ball of nothingness,” Ketchum said, dragging the conversation back to the subject by the scruff of its neck. “What was it like?”
Harry described it, and then described how he had learned about it. Everyone looked disapproving at that, even Gregory, who muttered something under her breath about how “Potter could have died, and then no one would ever know what he risked his life to find out.” Draco was glad to discover that he had a few allies here, at least. Maybe their combined disapproval would be enough to keep Harry from doing anything else stupid.
Then he thought of the complications Harry had confessed were behind his impulse to risk his life, and sighed. Maybe not.
“So we have to destroy Nemo,” Gregory said when Harry had finished talking. She was sitting so bolt upright that Draco wondered why her shoulders didn’t hurt. “The way we lured in and destroyed Nusquam. That should be fun.”
None of the Aurors, Draco noticed, reacted with shock to the announcement that they had killed Nusquam. Gregory must have told them about that.
“A fine ambition,” Lowell said. “And exactly how do you think that we should achieve that? After losing one of his servants, Nihil is going to be more cautious than he was, and it sounds as if he would keep Nemo by him, to raise these beasts, not send him out on killing expeditions the way Nusquam was sent.”
“I also would not give much for our odds in facing him,” Weston added. “He seems to be the weakest of the three, but that makes him all the more likely to rely on the tools around him, like these beasts, instead of allowing himself to be caught.”
“I’ve thought of something.”
That was Granger’s voice, of course. Draco glanced at her and sighed. He hoped that she wouldn’t make the comitatus look ridiculous in front of the Aurors; that was all he asked for.
Granger held up a book that was so worn and tattered along the edges Draco didn’t know why it hadn’t collapsed yet. It appeared to be bound in dragonskin, but still. Any force that could abrade dragonskin that way could abrade paper. “I didn’t-I found a description of the ritual that I think Nemo is using to raise the beasts,” she said. “It’s mentioned and described in a footnote about human necromancy. It takes a lot of time and preparation. He probably can’t go very fast, and he would be attracted to any rumor that there was a faster way.”
“And you want us to spread such a rumor,” Draco said, simply to be the one who incarnated the theory in words for the others.
Granger nodded so hard that her hair bounced. “Yes. Say that there’s a book. Hint that we’re on the verge of figuring it out for ourselves, perhaps. That would make him all the more determined to find it.”
The Aurors burst into argument. Draco was silent, though, gazing thoughtfully at Granger, who flushed and held her chin up higher, as if daring him to disapprove of her.
At the moment, Draco didn’t think he could. Perhaps not ever again.
Chapter Eighteen.
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