Chapter Nineteen of 'Seasons of War'- Drawing Fire
Chapter Eighteen.
Title: Seasons of War (19/?)
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 Nineteen-Drawing Fire
“Why did you not tell us that Hermione Granger was having strange dreams?”
Of all the tricks that Holder tended to pull on him, Draco thought he hated this one the most. He was given no chance to defend himself, no chance to come up with a tactic that might deflect the question or turn it back on her. Instead, she simply launched the question and then prowled forwards, eyes fastened on his face, expecting him to fail.
Behind her sat Robards, and Draco wasn’t confident about fooling him, even if he could fool her.
But being surprised or feeling irritation was no reason to give up. Draco locked his hands together and responded coolly. “Because she won’t confide in me. I hear only rumors, and now and then I hear that Occlumency is working to help her, and then I hear that it isn’t, and then I hear that she’s dismissed them as only nightmares, and now I hear that she’s decided they’re important again and is monitoring them carefully.” Draco offered a helpless shrug, hopeful that it didn’t make him look too helpless. “What can I do? Unless she was my close friend and told me the truth about them in such a way that I could be sure it was the truth, I would be telling only rumors and unimportant scraps of detail.”
Holder turned around and met Robards’s eyes directly after his little speech. Draco didn’t know why, and he didn’t want to drive himself mad trying to figure it out. He waited instead, his breathing calm. He kept his eyes lowered as if ashamed, but that was more so neither of these clowns would see the furious contempt in them.
Why not bring her in here and ask her yourself? Why not assume that they are important and treat her with caution and respect instead of setting someone to spy on her?
But once again, Draco ran into the wall of the Aurors’ disregard of the trainees. They seemed to have decided that, since so few trainees made it through the program to become Aurors, their opinions weren’t worth listening to until they had “proved” themselves. And, Draco was rapidly coming to realize, trainees could “prove” themselves six days a week and still be accused of missing the seventh.
“From now on, you will make an effort to talk to her about her dreams,” Holder said, in such a clipped tone that Draco might have thought she’d argued about it with Robards, except that she didn’t piss without his permission.
“Yes, madam,” Draco said, and then waited. He was going to lie, of course. He would talk to Granger, yes, but even if she gave him permission to spit every detail, he wouldn’t betray her privacy that way. Granger was part of his comitatus, and Holder and Robards didn’t have the right to the details of her mind or her memory.
Holder spent a few moments more stroking her sleeve and staring at him. If it was an intimidation tactic, it was one that didn’t impress Draco. He stared back with calm, flat eyes, and in the end, Holder nodded and turned her back.
“Otherwise, your instructions are the same as they were before,” she said curtly. “Dismissed.” Robards had already picked up a piece of parchment and was sketching on it.
Draco took a deep breath, released it, and bowed. Neither of them paid attention, which was the reason he was able to curve his hand over to the side and flick his wand in a nonverbal Summoning Charm. One piece of paper from a large stack that Robards had kept his elbow on during most of the interview detached and soared over to Draco, dropping neatly into his pocket. Since both Holder and Robards kept their heads turned so determinedly away from him, to teach him his place, they didn’t have the chance to stop him.
Trust me to have stolen a worthless piece of paper, probably, Draco thought as he stalked out of the tent. But even if it’s only an irritation to them instead of the loss of something crippling, I needed that.
*
“Have you ever worked with a Seer before, Trainee Potter?”
“Yes,” Harry said. He didn’t like this. Portillo Lopez had said that Raverat was a member of her Order, but he had brought Harry into a tent filled with mirrors and glass cauldrons and then asked that question. Harry was not going to let someone like this peer into his mind. “Her name was Sybil Trelawney.”
Raverat laughed. He sounded normal, at least, Harry thought, not like he was trying to be funnier than he really was. “She’s not a real Seer,” he said, swinging one leg from where he sat in his chair. It reminded Harry of a Muggle camping chair, although the one Raverat had given him was the normal hard wooden kind that Aurors thought appropriate to trainees. “She can’t control her gift of prophecy.”
“And you can?” Harry retorted. He cast a glance at the entrance of the test, wondering if Portillo Lopez was still outside it. He would run if she wasn’t, and try to find a more normal solution later.
“No, unfortunately,” Raverat said. “I was about to tell you there are no real Seers, because none of us can control our gifts. The ones who do inevitably turn out to be charlatans.” He made a wide, helpless gesture with one hand when Harry turned to eye him again. “I began studying Divination because it infuriated me that there was a power of the mind that could still escape our understanding, in this advanced day and age. But I’ve had no better luck than anyone else in bringing it absolutely under control. I’ve managed to remain awake a few times, for a few seconds, when a voice of prophecy starts to speak through me, but I can never remember more than that. It’s frustrating.”
Harry eyed him again. Maybe Raverat was saner than he’d thought him. “Well, if you’re not a Seer, then what are you going to do?”
“I’d like to find a solution in your mind for our problems,” Raverat said, so casually that it took Harry a moment to really realize what he’d said. “You’re unique. You’ve practiced necromancy without succumbing to it, but you’ve also been connected to both of the biggest disruptions that the forces of life and death have had in many generations. You might be the gateway to our solution.”
Harry swallowed and shifted back in his chair. “And how much has your study of Divination taught you about the mind?”
“Quite a bit.” Raverat smiled at him. “I don’t blame you for being nervous. I’m not going to go very far this time. But Portillo Lopez told me something she suspected, which I think is wrong. She thinks that your magic is such a hybrid of life and death that you could cast a spell and close this gateway that Nihil has opened, the gateway making the ghosts of dead unicorns and other shades appear, if you wanted to. I don’t agree. Will you let me look into your thoughts and glimpse the true nature of your magic?”
“Don’t you have to look at my magical core if you want to do that?” Harry demanded, and was proud to think that he had remembered some of the theory that Draco and Portillo Lopez between them were trying to teach him.
Raverat shook his head. “What I’m looking for is knowledge, knowledge that you may have hidden from yourself beneath the surface of your mind. Looking at magical cores is a delicate specialty and one usually only performed in cases of disease. I would hate to do it without a specialist about.”
Harry clenched his fists on the arms of the chair and didn’t care if Raverat saw it. He sounded honest. That didn’t mean he was. And Harry thought he had earned the right to be cautious about who he trusted and what he granted them the right to do with that trust.
On the other hand, it was probably better to have someone like Raverat, who sounded sane, peering into his head than someone like Portillo Lopez, who he didn’t trust not to go too far, or Ketchum, whom he trusted but didn’t think had the skills. Or Portillo Lopez might show up tomorrow with a new member of her Order who was impatient and would insist on looking at the magical core.
Besides, Harry only had to think of the shade of Lucius Malfoy to want this problem solved. The longer the war lasted, the more it would cost Draco and other people.
“All right,” he said.
Raverat gave him an approving smile. “Excellent! Well, then, lean forwards in your chair, if you please.” He moved his chair closer and waited until Harry had obeyed, shuffling slowly along. No matter how slowly Harry went, though, Raverat didn’t look displeased, but only understanding. Harry decided that there was some hope in that, too. Raverat might just be a good liar, but most of the Aurors who had to deal with trainees weren’t even that.
Raverat surrounded Harry’s head with his hands, but didn’t actually touch it. His palms simply hovered in the air, and his voice was smooth and low. Harry strained to feel some brush of his fingers against his temples, and detected nothing. “Now, I need you to keep as still and quiet as you can. It’s not wrong for you to breathe or clear your throat, but quietness and stillness helps me concentrate.”
Harry closed his eyes in a slow blink of acknowledgment, since he didn’t want to nod, and then kept them shut. Raverat probably wasn’t going to do anything threatening-why would he?-but Harry felt better like that anyway. He realized he was panting shallowly and tried to force himself to stop.
“I promise,” Raverat said, his voice sounding physically distant, “that I won’t hurt you, no matter what happens. You shouldn’t even detect me, if all goes well.”
Harry blinked again, reassured by the first statement but not the second. If someone was going to dig through his mind, he would actually prefer to feel it. Then, as with Snape’s Occlumency, he could tell where they were if not what they were looking at. Anything, even useless knowledge, was a weapon against helplessness.
Raverat made a few clucking noises under his breath, the way someone might when studying a report. Harry felt a brief flicker of air around one ear and thought a finger must have moved, but Raverat never said anything that would indicate it was so. Once, he did turn sideways in his chair, and Harry’s eyes leaped open to see him leaning out to the left this time, his hands still rested around Harry’s head with his fingers splayed. Harry closed his eyes again and tried to keep away the feeling that he looked a lot like a Muggle telly.
“I thought so,” Raverat said.
Harry clenched his hands on the edge of the chair and fought not to jump.
“That’s the signal that you can move,” Raverat added, with another of those soft laughs. “I’ve examined your mind, and I think that there is a connection between you and Nihil, yes. But it’s not a direct one. It has to do with you being on the same plane, bound to the same kind of disturbance between the forces of life and death. Portillo Lopez envisioned an actual link, as it were, stretched between them. Instead, it’s more as if you were standing in the same room.”
Harry opened his eyes cautiously and then reached up and touched the side of his skull. He didn’t feel the lump he’d half-expected. Of course, he didn’t think that Raverat had touched him or come close except with that brushing of one finger.
“How did you do that?” he asked.
“Long discipline,” Raverat said, with a faint smile, and then snorted when Harry peered at him. “I was trying to keep it simple, since Portillo Lopez said that you had some troubles with magical theory.”
“Go on,” Harry said, and folded his arms. “I’ll tell you when I find it confusing, and then you can stop.”
Raverat studied him for some moments as though expecting him to change his mind, then tilted his head in acknowledgment and began. “The human mind contains a lot of electricity. Did you know that? Well, it does. Some of the electricity, at least to someone with a magical mindset and the ability to sense it, extends outside the skull. It forms a hovering aura around you, a sort of corona, like the kind that surrounds the sun. One can read spots in it, the currents, and the changing of the weather patterns, as it were.” He paused, but Harry nodded. It sounded more comprehensible than most of the explanations that Portillo Lopez had tried to give him so far.
“It takes a few minutes to get familiar with the currents of someone else’s mind, at least as long as they’re calm,” Raverat said. “Storms-that is, sudden, violent changes of emotion-blowing across the pattern can disrupt it. But what I do is cast a spell on each of my fingers that makes them sensitive to those currents. Then I spread them out, sense the currents, and start separating the electricity that corresponds to your moods and the normal activity of your brain from the electricity that corresponds to your magic. And in a case like this, where I’m familiar with someone else’s magic-Nihil’s-then I can compare my impressions of it to my impressions of yours. Like I said, they’re on the same plane but with no direct connection. My fingers would have vibrated much more than the slight bit they did if there was a connection.”
“Why can’t Portillo Lopez talk like that?” Harry complained. “I don’t understand how you learned to do it or develop it, but I could understand what you said.”
Raverat laughed again. “I’m afraid that Portillo Lopez thinks the most precise words are the best ones, and if her audience can’t keep up, then they should simply go away and get themselves an explanation. At any rate.” He looked a bit regretful now. “The solution’s not going to be as simple as she thought. She was thinking that we could just pull out some of your magic and stuff it into the gateway between the worlds like a bit of sacking. We can’t.”
“Well, er, good,” Harry said dazedly. He could see why Portillo Lopez hadn’t wanted to phrase it that way, at least. Draco would have objected.
“I’ll bring the results to her, because it is at least good that you have some similarities to Nihil,” said Raverat, and clapped him on the shoulder. “We can’t use you to plug the hole, but perhaps we can experiment on you and get an idea of how those experiments would work on Nihil.” He waited expectantly, then dissolved into a fit of snickering. “You should see your face,” he said.
*
“Have you found anything else in your research about bones?”
Granger shook her head in Draco’s direction, not seeming to be surprised by the silent way he had stepped into the tent. Draco felt disappointment, and then told himself a moment later that that was childish. He leaned on her table and studied the sketches and diagrams in front of her. Most of them seemed to be pictures of chairs and long bridges. Draco nodded. It wasn’t his area of expertise, but he knew there were children’s stories about Dark wizards building arches and thrones from the bones of their enemies.
“Nothing conclusive,” Granger said at last, leaning back from the table and closing her eyes for a moment. There were lines of weariness on her brow, and Draco wondered why Weasley didn’t smooth them away. That seemed like something he could do, at least. “I’ve learned that Grindelwald made a few machines from bones, that bone siege towers were repeated during the Muggle Persecution-but they were probably rumors started to frighten the Muggles in the first place-and that various wandmakers claim to have constructed wands of basilisk bones. But all of that was physical, not in dreams.”
“Even so,” Draco began.
“I know, Malfoy.” Granger opened one eye to glare at him. “You don’t need to tell me about the possible analogy between dreams and reality.”
“You’re living that analogy every night?” Draco asked quietly. He was no longer sure how often Granger had the dreams.
Granger twitched her head to the side. “Most nights. Sometimes the dreams are gentler and let me go more easily, but there doesn’t seem to be a pattern.”
“Hmmm.” Draco picked up the nearest picture, of a heavy bridge that soared across a rushing river. “Have you been able to sense anything of Nihil’s presence in those dreams? I mean, is he the one taking you apart? Or is it simply the darkness?”
“No one else has wanted to know the morbid details,” Granger said, the hiss of a question in the back of her voice.
Draco shrugged and met her glare evenly. She could think it was simple curiosity that was driving him along if she wanted to, but Draco thought she was smarter than that and would see otherwise.
“Yes, fine,” Granger said. “I could sense Nihil at first, or at least a force of evil that I would have called Nihil, but I can only see darkness now. If he started stripping me of my bones, then he’s gone on elsewhere and left this machine to run itself.” A bitter smile flickered across her lips, and Draco thought that Granger had never been as congenial a spirit as she became when she was having nightmares.
“And is it the same bones every time, in the same pattern?” Draco put down the picture of the bridge and picked up one of a throne crowned on the back with a dragon’s skull. Draco thought it impractical, even for one of the notoriously unstable Dark Lords. Sitting in it would mean catching one’s hair continually on the fangs. “Or does it vary?”
Granger gave him an approving glance, and Draco understood. No one else had talked to her about this, whether through intimidation or simple squeamishness. But Granger did better when she dealt with it analytically.
“The pattern seems to be the same each time,” Granger said, and glanced about with a distracted air until she found a blank piece of parchment that she could draw on. This time she started sketching a human body, and Draco decided that she was a much less skilled artist when she was trying to draw on her own instead of copy a picture. Still, he could tell what she was talking about easily enough. “First, the leg bones go, from the ankles up. Then the hips. Then there’s always a pause, and sometimes I wake up. Then the ribs, and the arm bones.”
“Do you ever dream about losing your skull?” Draco asked.
“Twice now,” Granger said, her eyes dry and her voice strong. She could at least look at dangers and not flinch from them, Draco thought. He reckoned that was one good thing about the Gryffindor temperament. “Once was last night.”
Draco nodded and looked again at the image of the throne crowned with the dragon’s skull. Perhaps Nihil was only playing on these particular fears because he could, rather than because he was taking the bones for the same purpose as some of the legends.
And then Draco’s breath stuttered in his throat, and he wanted to curse himself for a fool. After all, they knew where some of Nihil’s influences came from. They didn’t know as much about him as would have been useful, but neither did they have to sit back and fuss in helplessness.
“The Death Eater caches,” he murmured.
“What about them?” Granger finished the last touches on the skull of her drawing-which was being tugged away from the body she’d drawn as though one could just peel the face off like a rag, Draco noted in some queasiness-and looked up.
“We should check the records in the Death Eater caches and learn whether they conducted any experiments with bones,” Draco said.
Granger’s smile really could light up a room, the way Harry had described it as doing more than once. “Yes,” she said. “Of course. But weren’t a lot of the records and books destroyed when Nihil attacked the barracks?”
“I still have the Pensieve,” Draco said, and stood up to lead the way.
He did wonder, as he walked, whether Professor Snape would have liked Granger looking into his memories. But he was sure that the professor would have understood a sacrifice for the greater good, and a sacrifice made to help an ally.
*
“How could you let Raverat examine you that way?”
Harry rolled his eyes and leaned forwards so that he could peer at the platform and glamours Hermione had set up. Even knowing that it was all illusion, he found it difficult to see the difference. Hermione had done a really good job, he thought. “Because I trusted him after speaking with him. You’ll see, once you talk to him more often than a few barbed exchanges of words in front of the other Aurors.”
“You shouldn’t have let him get into your mind like that. You have no idea what he might have done.”
Harry gritted his teeth and didn’t answer. He had promised Draco that he would think before taking risks, yet. He hadn’t thought about the fact that Draco might consider letting someone look into his mind a risk in and of itself.
“You were busy with Holder and Robards when he wanted to do it,” he improvised, when he looked to the side and discovered that Draco was still staring at him critically.
“That has nothing to do with it,” Draco said, his brow wrinkling as though he were trying, and failing, to work out why that would matter.
“Yes, it does,” Harry said. “I considered the risk, and judged it worth taking. Among other things, he actually explained the magic in a way that I understood,” he added, hoping that would be enough to distract Draco.
“Next time, tell me.”
Harry glared at him. “You’re my partner, my lover, and my friend,” he said. “Not my father.”
Draco’s hand clamped down on his arm, fingers digging into his skin. “I’m the one who has to watch out for you, since you’re apparently incapable of doing it for yourself!” he said in a harsh whisper.
“Whatever you need to say to convince yourself,” Harry muttered, and wrenched his arm free with a pull that made Draco sway sideways. He was leaning closer in the next moment, crowding Harry back against the walls of the wards that sheltered them. Harry stiffened his legs and pushed against him, more than annoyed now.
And then he caught a flicker of movement from beyond the wards, above the illusory book that looked so tempting both Hermione and Draco had said that Nemo would be a fool to resist it.
“Shove it!” he whispered harshly to Draco, and pushed him on the shoulder to get his attention. “We’ve got a visitor.”
Draco turned his head, but kept one eye on Harry while he did it, as if he assumed that this was a trick. Harry hissed at him, but Draco ignored it, watching intently. Harry turned his head, too, and saw the flicker again, just above the book.
Draco snarled in satisfaction. “I’ve got it,” he said, and drew his wand. In a moment, he was free of the wards and bounding across the grass.
Now who’s taking risks, idiot? Harry thought in fury, and dived after him.
Chapter Twenty.
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