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Soldier's Welcome	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 25565 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter; that belongs to J. K. Rowling. I am making no money from this fic.

Chapter List
- 44
- 45
Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last
chapter of Soldier�s Welcome; I�ll be
starting the second story in the trilogy about a week from now. That one will
be called Ceremonies of Strife and
cover the second year of Auror training.

Epilogue

�� Harry
thought the moment of staring, fascinated silence lasted for several minutes,
but it couldn�t have, because Portillo Lopez plunged past them and ran up to
Dearborn, and she couldn�t have thought she had a chance of saving him if he
had been lying there several minutes.

�� That was
the kind of thing Harry had to tell himself as he stood up and touched Draco�s
arm so Draco would continue to know that he was there. The world around him
seemed dazed and shaky, echoing the way he felt. When he looked at things, it
took his eyes and brain an instant longer than usual
to come together. When he studied the dead, his emotions seemed mired in mud.
He would feel the urge to cry when he was studying a broken wall instead.

�� He watched
Portillo Lopez working frantically over Dearborn
and stroked Draco�s shoulder in the meantime, because he could feel how tense
Draco was at the thought of losing his mentor. And of course Harry didn�t want Dearborn to die either.
Sometimes, he�d been a prick to Harry, but that didn�t mean he deserved death,
any more than it had meant Snape had.

�� Then
Portillo Lopez gave a cry that sounded�wounded was the only description that
Harry could put on it. He looked back in time to see her staring at her
fingers, and a patch of empty floor beneath them. He wondered where Dearborn�s body had gone.
Had someone snatched it away or Apparated it away so that they could give it a
proper funeral?

�� His eyes
had focused on the pile of dust before his brain let him know, as much from
Portillo Lopez�s babbled comments as anything else, what it must have been.

�� He
crumbled beneath my touch,� Portillo Lopez whispered. �It�s as if he had been
dead for years, with no life-force left in his body. As if he was a still
image, like the tapestries you see sometimes in ruins that preserve their
original forms but will crumble if you touch them.� She covered her face with
her hands.

�� As people
crowded around her to reassure her, Harry heard the tramp of marching feet. He
whirled to face the far end of the Atrium, stepping forwards so that he could
shelter Draco and perhaps the others, and lifted his wand.

�� Ron and
Hermione came into view, running madly the moment they saw him, shouts breaking
from their throats. Behind them were the dark red robes of the War Wizards,
come, at last, and too late.

�� Harry
spread his arms wide to embrace his best friends and grunted with the impact of
their hug, while trying to use the pressure of his shoulder to comfort Draco.

*

�� As we
gather this day to remember the fallen, I hope that everyone here will
demonstrate the bravery and heroism they did��

�� Draco bowed
his head and let the useless words wash around him. Useless words couldn�t
change the fact that the War Wizards had been far from the Ministry when they
were most needed, and that the Aurors had fought the incursion of Nihil�s
forces alone. Useless words couldn�t make him feel better, when he knew that
they were in the middle of a second war so soon after they had escaped from the
first.

�� Useless
words couldn�t make Dearborn
come back.

�� He sneaked
a glance around at the spectators who stood about him, studying the expressions
on their faces. They mostly consisted of Aurors, but there were other Ministry
employees who had fought beside the Aurors on that dreadful day. Most of them
looked grim. Some were weeping; Dearborn
had not been the only person who died in that chaos. Other people wiped away
leaking tears with their sleeves and stared at the Minister as if they expected
him to make it all better.

�� Minister Shacklebolt stood in front of them all on a raised stage of
what Draco�s eyes had first seen as bones but his mind knew was really white
stone, conjured for the occasion. The graveyard around them was bright with
newly-turned earth. Draco hadn�t realized before now that the Ministry owned
several cemeteries around the country, where they buried people who died in the
line of duty�at least, if their families would allow that.

�� In Dearborn�s case, there
hadn�t been any family to ask. His parents were dead. He had had one brother, Caradoc, who had been a member of what Harry called the
Order of the Phoenix and who had vanished during the first war with the Dark
Lord, probably to be killed by Death Eaters. Dearborn had given his life for the past ten
years to the training of young Aurors and sometimes fieldwork if he was needed.
So the Ministry had accepted that he would want to be buried as an Auror and
done it with full honors.

�� Draco let
his gaze fall briefly on the stone, carved with nothing more than the name DAFFYD DEARBORN, the dates he had been
born and died, and the Latin inscription Cum summo honore, before he
looked away. He had to find some other target for his gaze; otherwise, it would
start watering, and some people would make unfortunate assumptions about a
Malfoy�s possible weakness from that.

�� The
gathering was encircled by a large panoply of War
Wizards.� Draco sneered at them, but
half-heartedly. He�d done some asking around since the battle, and one thing
had become abundantly clear: the Ministry didn�t call them up often because the
War Wizards were expensive. They cost
a lot to train, to maintain, to find places that would permit them to exercise
their magic without Muggle notice, and to outfit, never mind the pay they got
for heading into dangerous situations like the hunt for Nihil.

�� As much as
he disliked it in one sense, Draco could understand the pure cold practicality
that had concentrated the War Wizards in the places Nihil had been thought most
likely to haunt instead of keeping them circled around the Ministry. If that
had happened, then Nihil would simply have struck somewhere else, and then the
public could make a justified outcry about those expensive wizards protecting
people who should be able to protect themselves.

�� Last, his
glance went to Harry, who stood quiet and proud beside him.

�� Harry had
never once left his side in the last few days until Draco asked him to. He
hadn�t always spoken, either, but simply sat reading in the same room, offering
the quiet strength of his presence. He had touched Draco�s shoulder with a flat
hand, had embraced him, and had kissed him when Draco had said that he wouldn�t
object to that. Draco had never known how comforting it would be to have
someone there he could turn to if he wished and ignore the rest of the time.
Malfoys were supposed to bear their grievances privately, in silence.

�� I like this way better, Draco thought,
and leaned his shoulder into Harry�s. Harry had been paying more attention to
the Minister�s speech than he had, but he still had the time to give Draco a
quick glance and a smile.

�� And the
heroism of those who have fallen should remind us��

�� Draco
rolled his eyes and turned to the left to study the spectators over there
again. This was the reason that he didn�t feel he had missed much by ignoring
Minister Shacklebolt�s speech. It was all repetition,
over and over again, of the same few themes and key words. If someone could
feel better from that, they were welcome to take the comfort that should have
been Draco�s and spread it all over themselves.

�� He caught a
glimpse of a tall woman with long dark hair, standing with her head bowed, whom
it seemed as if he should know. He watched her idly for a moment until she
turned towards him and smiled at him.

�� It was Nusquam. Draco couldn�t be mistaken in that pale face or
those brilliant blue eyes.

�� He pinched
Harry�s arm, and Harry looked, too, with a muttered exclamation about how Draco
didn�t have to pinch so hard. The moment he saw Nusquam,
he stared, his mouth falling open and slack, and Draco could have no doubt that
he recognized her, too. Why shouldn�t he? They had been face-to-face with her
in one of their worst battles, more than close enough to know her later.

�� Nusquam turned and took a few steps in the direction of the
outer cordon of War Wizards. Draco opened his mouth to yell, to alert someone
to her presence.

�� Her body
dissolved into golden spheres of light that swirled into the sky and were gone
in moments, popping like bubbles.

�� Draco shut
his mouth and swallowed. The weight of Harry leaning into him from the side
felt less reassuring than usual.

�� Nowhere is safe.

*

�� To Harry�s
astonishment, they didn�t make the trainees clean up the Ministry. Instead,
they hired professional cleaners and curse-breakers and pushed the trainees
back into their classes as if they didn�t want to remember what had happened.

�� Or, more to the point, Harry thought
more than once as he bent over a page of notes taken in the new Offensive and
Defensive class under Pushkin, as if they want us to concentrate on other things.

�� The weeks
seemed to gallop from that point forwards. They had essays to write, classes to
attend, spells to practice, exams to revise for. The instructors hurried them
from point to point, scarcely giving them enough time to stop or slow down.
Harry was lucky if he got to exchange a few words with Ron and Hermione about
anything that didn�t relate to their classes.

�� Hermione
still wanted to investigate the Death Eaters� caches, but, as she said
regretfully, there was no time. Ron
was interested in the report Harry and Draco had of Nusquam
at the mass funeral, but again, there was no more time to do anything about it.
And the instructors seemed uninterested in hearing about Nusquam,
telling Harry and Draco flatly that they had other things to worry about, and
anyway, the Ministry was preparing a new offensive that would take place during
the summer�a time when they would be out of classes but still should not act so
as to embarrass the Auror program.

�� Harry felt
as though he would like to collapse many times during the following weeks, but
he had Draco to concern him�Draco, whom he didn�t think had recovered as well
as he had pretended to from Dearborn�s
death�and Hermione�s grim determination that he would pass all these courses. Many questions occurred to him, but
he put most of them out of his mind to think about later.

�� Two things
only would not be put so conveniently aside.

�� The first
was his private choice to spend some time alone at Grimmauld Place during the first weeks of
summer. There was a book on necromancy that he needed to read so he could make
some decisions.

�� I haven�t done anything wrong. And in fact,
I�m going to read the book so that I don�t.

�� There�s nothing wrong with thinking about
it.

�� The second
was a sight he saw during their Battle Healing exam, which, to his
astonishment, he managed to pass because his knowledge of wounds and healing
spells as used in defensive magic more than made up for his piss-poor knowledge
of potions. He glanced up from healing a slash that a Slicing Curse had left in
a flesh dummy and saw Portillo Lopez bending over to address another student.
Her hair was disordered, her sleeves singed. As well as proctoring the exam,
she�d been on hand to stop some of their more intricate incantations from going
wrong.

�� A piece of
her robe on the shoulder was burned away. Harry�s tired eyes focused on the
skin beneath, and it was as if he was back in the aftermath of the battle
again, trying to make sense of what those eyes were telling him. He blinked and
blinked again, and finally it snapped into place.

�� It was a
small dark symbol, something Harry didn�t think he would have noticed in most
cases. It was this hyper-sensitive attention he was feeling at the moment that
made it seem so special. He thought it looked like a wheel, and in the center,
along the spokes of the wheel, were drawn odd, tapering leaves and black
berries.

�� He reached
out to nudge Draco with an elbow, and then remembered that Portillo Lopez had
separated them for this exam. She didn�t want their compatible magic unduly
influencing the results.

�� Portillo
Lopez straightened up, and the robe slid over the mark. Then she came over to
examine Harry�s work, and he forgot about the symbol for the moment in the
nervousness of whether he was about to pass.

�� He and
Draco both passed, and met after the exam for a celebratory snog.
Harry told him then, when they had finished the kiss and drew back, at least
with him feeling unaccountably shy,
about the symbol on Portillo Lopez�s shoulder.

�� Draco
froze. Then he rolled upright and Summoned one of his
Potions books. He leafed through the pages, frowning, then
held out the book towards Harry. �Is that the plant you think she had in the
tattoo?� he asked.

�� Harry
focused on the leaves and the black berries, and nodded. �Yeah, I think so.�

�� That�s
belladonna,� Draco whispered. �Deadly nightshade. Why
was she wearing it, I wonder?�

�� Harry shook
his head helplessly and pulled Draco back down for another kiss. He and Draco
had both been too exhausted to go further than that in the past few weeks, but
he was hoping�

�� Draco
shoved back suddenly, one hand flat on Harry�s chest, and shook his head. His
hair was loose around his face, his eyes so glazed that he had to blink several
times before he could focus on Harry, and Harry was at least glad to see that.

��

�� I can�t,�
he whispered. �Not right now, Harry. Not when we�re about to
part for the summer.�

�� But we�ll see each other,� Harry protested,
pressing up until Draco could feel the ridge of his erection. �Won�t we? You
won�t deny me the right to come to Malfoy Manor?� He cuddled close to Draco and
lowered his voice. �Would you?�

�� No.� Draco
licked his lips. �But, Harry, there�s something my mother�s hiding from me, I
think, something I�ll need time alone with her to get out of her. And you
wanted to spend a week by yourself, at least? Didn�t you?�

�� Harry
nodded, collapsing back on the pillow and at the moment ready to tell Draco all
about the necromancy book, if it would break apart this stupid distance between
them. A second�s thought convinced him what a stupid idea that would have been,
luckily, but he couldn�t help the whine that crept into his voice. �But we can
do something over the summer? You promise?�

�� Draco
ducked his head and rolled out of the bed. �Yes.�

�� Harry
stared at him, caught by the flatness in his voice. Then he reached out and
seized Draco�s hand before he could get too far away. Draco tensed, but didn�t
try to break his grip. Harry took a deep breath, so that his voice would be as
gentle as possible when it came out. �What�s wrong?�

�� Draco
turned to face him, and Harry couldn�t mistake the flat sheen in his eyes for
anything but what it was.

�� Fear.

�� Harry
immediately leaned forwards and embraced him. �It doesn�t matter,� he
whispered. �We�ll go as slowly as you need to.� He laughed, and hoped it didn�t
sound false. He was always worried that what sounded perfectly reasonable to
him wouldn�t to other people. �Can you really think that all I want from you is
sex, when we�ve been together this long?�

�� No,� Draco
whispered into his hair. �But I thought you might be getting�impatient. And
there are so many other people who would go to bed with you in a heartbeat.�

�� I don�t
want them,� Harry said fiercely. �I want you.�

�� That was the right thing to say, because
Draco�s arms tightened around him, and he kissed the nape of Harry�s neck.
Harry held him and let him whisper the words he wanted to say, about how he
thought this would change his whole life, and he wanted to, but he also wanted to be sure that he wouldn�t regret it
or think about it only under the shadow of other things, like the exams, and
how the summer would be perfect�

�� There is no perfect time, Harry thought,
the experience he�d shared with Ginny aching like an arrow wound in his chest. Only the time that you make.

�� But because
he understood, he kissed Draco and let him go, with the prospect of a future to
be looked for and won.

*

�� Draco
sighed and shut his Potions books. Looking up deadly nightshade and the
significance it might have when bound to the spokes of a wheel had yielded
exactly nothing. There were tantalizing hints and clues, sometimes, in the
descriptions of the potions it was used in, but Portillo Lopez was more than a
potions-brewer. Draco couldn�t be sure that that was the key to understanding
what the plant meant to her.

�� He wasn�t
even sure if the tattoo was important, to be honest. Yes, it was hidden, but
many people got marks they weren�t exactly proud of, which they couldn�t remove
later and had to hide. (Draco glanced at his left arm).

�� Still, they
couldn�t afford to ignore what might be clues, and that meant he would research
it over the week he and Harry were apart, and hope to have some answer by the
time they came together again.

�� Draco
smiled wryly. So that�s it. I was mostly
thinking about this to use it as a distraction from how empty the rooms seem
with Harry gone, and now I can admit it to myself.

�� There was
really no reason to delay any longer. Harry had already left for Grimmauld Place,
and his mother had indicated that he would be welcome to return home to the
Manor at any time. Draco had tried to put it off mainly because, here, he still
had a sense of Harry�s lingering presence.

�� He slid the
book into a satchel that would shape itself to carry as many objects as he
wanted, stood up, and walked to the fireplace. The instructors had given as
many trainees as needed it Floo powder to allow them to travel home from the
barracks, assuming they didn�t want to Apparate or were headed for locations
that were covered by anti-Apparition wards, like the Manor.

�� Malfoy
Manor!� Draco called, and the flames seized him and carried him away.

�� He stumbled
out, coughing, onto the carpet of a small anteroom, and looked around curiously.
This wasn�t the usual room that the Floo connections were set to spit their
visitors out into.

�� The carpet
was thick and soft, a diamond-shaped pattern of red on black, and the soot that
fell on it vanished at once, a sign that house-elves were not needed or welcome
in this room. The furniture was ebony, the clock on the wall gold with black
accents. Draco laid his satchel down on a small, shiny table and looked towards
the door, wondering if an explanation awaited him there.

�� His mother
did indeed stand in the doorway, and her smile was both proud and bloodless, as
if she rejoiced in something that had happened but doubted that Draco would.
She came forwards to take his hands, kiss his cheek, and smile into his eyes.

�� Oh,
Draco,� she whispered. �Something wonderful has happened. Without
notice. That is what I cannot
understand. To manage this, that is one thing. It has been managed before. But
to manage it without notice, so that
we will not get in trouble, and yet we can have what we most want.�

�� Draco
blinked at her, wondering what in the world she was talking about. His mother
turned and gestured to the doorway with one slender hand.

�� Draco
looked up again.

�� His father
stepped into the room, ducking his head slightly to avoid the lintel, and
nodded to Draco. �I escaped Azkaban without their notice, my son,� he said. He
wore much the same smile that Narcissa did, but the haughty tilt to his head
was all his own. �Welcome home.�

�� The End.

*

�� MewMew2: Thanks!
I hope this cliffhanger tides you over in the break between this story and the
next.

�� Thrnbrooke: Here it is.

�� hieisdragoness18:
Thanks!

�� Narcissa
Black: Thanks so much for commenting. I hope your holidays are happy as well.
And don�t worry. Draco finds another mentor next year.

�� SP777:
Thanks! I want to show that Harry and Draco are improving, but gradually. It�s
not like they�re experts on dueling yet the way the Aurors are.

�� Maybe Draco
will learn to perform his Patronus soon, maybe not.

�� Lillybe: Thanks!

�� I will be
continuing the second story in about a week�s time.
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Soldier's Welcome