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Seasons of War	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 9694 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Eight�Behind
Death

�� Harry felt
a cold wind blow around him when he was still some distance from the tent that
housed Nusquam. It tugged at his hair and made him feel, briefly, as if someone
held the point of a knife to his neck. Then it hurried past him and flung
itself into the camp. Harry heard the walls of canvas ripple and rustle, and
the noise of ropes cracking.

�� It was only
a bit of wind. There was no reason it should have made him start running as if
his feet were on fire.

�� But it did,
and at the same moment, he felt that sharp prickling sensation in his right
shoulder that Draco had described when Harry was in danger. Harry fell on his
knees before the small tent flap and crawled breathlessly inside, trying to
watch everything at once so he would have a chance of knowing what was
happening.

�� Draco sat
on the floor in an awkward position, one hand extended and eyes utterly still.
Harry knew he wasn�t unconscious, or his head would have fallen forwards, but
he didn�t know what was wrong.

�� A tendril
of thick darkness extended out from Nusquam to touch him. Nusquam was still in
bonds, but her face wasn�t her own, and Harry thought that was all that was
needed to put Draco in danger. He could only see a swimming golden whirlwind
where her face had been, in fact, and although it didn�t focus on him at the
moment, a shiver went down his spine anyway.

�� Gregory was
dancing about, screaming wordlessly and hurling curses Harry had never seen
before. All of them stopped a few feet away from Nusquam, or Nihil, or whatever
combination of the two it was now, as if they�d hit an invisible Shield Charm.
Harry nodded. He wouldn�t waste time trying to reach them by conventional
means, then.

�� He dropped
to one knee behind Draco and reached up to clasp his shoulders. Draco�s skin
was freezing beneath his touch, so stiff that it burned his fingers. Harry
gritted his teeth and managed to ignore that. He had to hang on. He had no idea why, because he didn�t have much of
a defensive strategy, but he knew that much.

�� The mask of
Nihil/Nusquam focused on him then. Harry saw a brief glimpse of what might have
been white teeth, and another dark arm lashed out of the bound figure,
traveling straight towards him. Its end was curved, Harry saw, and had suckers
on the end like an octopus�s tentacle.

�� He lowered
his head and bit savagely at his arm, tearing his head sideways so that a
bloody wound opened up. The blood dripped down his elbow but didn�t reach the
ground before the tendril hit him. Harry would have to hope that the mere use
of the blood was enough, and that it didn�t matter whether it hit the ground or
formed into a ring.

�� The
coldness and darkness surrounded him, but Harry kept his concentration on the colder
skin of Draco�s shoulders for a moment, and�

�� He didn�t
know how to describe it, afterwards. He knew what it felt like, and that was
all.

�� He reached
out and lashed his magic through the
blood, and the coldness, and all the sensations that he was feeling at that
small, tiny point in time. He knew the right directions because he could feel.
He could feel Draco, and the blood dripping warmly down his arm, and the aching
pain of the wound. He channeled his magic through it the way he would channel it
through a wand, and then screamed a challenge into the mouth of the tunnel that
he could feel gaping to swallow him.

�� Attack!�

�� The word
was in Parseltongue; he was already thinking about the image of a snake,
holding it firmly in his mind, the same great cobra with a spread hood that he
had used to defend himself from the shadow of Lucius Malfoy.

�� The
darkness boiled in front of him, and suddenly he could see the snake. Harry
hadn�t realized how much he was missing color until he saw it just then. This
was dark green, with here and there flecks of dark blue, and black where the
hood had cobra markings. Harry blinked. He hadn�t realized that he had
envisioned it so clearly, or that he would see it this way. Where had the blue
come from?

�� The cobra�s
head swung to face him, and Harry realized, with a start, that he should stop
thinking about stupid things like that. He gestured forwards with his head, or
what he thought was his head, and hissed the command again. �Find the one who is trying to hurt me and my
mate.� This wasn�t the time to worry about what kind of word for Draco the
Parseltongue would find. �Kill him.�

�� The cobra
slithered away into the dark. Harry clamped his fingers down on Draco�s
shoulders again and began to tug, trying to think of some way he could move
Draco spiritually as well as physically out of the trap.

�� Only when
the darkness glittered again, this time with small, brown-gold, fast-moving
snakes, did he realize that he already had an idea.

*

�� Draco was
locked in a freezing vault, and he was learning despair.

�� The lessons
pounded home each time with the crack of huge icicles being driven into his
body. He was pinned and stretched out on the wall of a glacier, and Nihil�s
voice laughed in his ears. Draco lost the memory of a loving embrace as he lay
there, and the taste of honey, and the sight of a sunrise.

�� He could
still remember the words. They were still in his mind. Nihil couldn�t take that
from him�at least, not yet. But no image came to him when he stretched his
memory after them, and less sensation.

�� You will learn all the lessons that I did, Nihil�s
voice told him, and Draco hated that he clung to the words, because at least
they were something that he could hear, something different from the endless
darkness and silence and cold.

�� The chains
holding him broke apart. Now he drifted, and was drawn by a powerful current
towards something that brushed him with rough, sharp edges. Draco thought he
was bleeding, and then realized that he had no idea if living concepts like
that applied here. He floated and tumbled, and the stream slammed him against
more edges and then began to push knowledge into his head.

�� In the moment when Nihil had become what he
now was, as the souls and bodies and magic of two brothers blended, driven by
the intense wish to escape pain, he had learned what lay behind death.

�� The words
ripped and tore at Draco. The words weren�t the means of their delivery; these
weren�t things Nihil was saying. It
was, rather, the way that Draco�s mind chose to process the information. He
struggled again to escape, and could find nothing, no way to fight, no way to
flee the consuming grip. He was in nothing.

�� Behind death lay stillness, and there lay
change. That was the great mistake of the necromancers and the others who knew
nothing about death except the common superstitions that they had learned from
questioning captured necromancers. They thought of death as the realm of
permanence and life as the realm of change. But death did change, by slow and
incomprehensible ticks, the way that an insect in amber might not realize it
was in amber and go on moving, limb by slow limb.

�� Draco
sobbed. His head felt near to bursting, and still the information fell on top
of him like cold sand and forced its way through his ears. He wondered if he
would die before the end. He wondered what he looked like right now.

�� Nihil had learned that transformation, and
how to master it. Nihil was that
transformation, drawn out of the corners of death, gathered in one place, and
given a will and a purpose. He could transform his spirits and his lives in
ways unknown to the living. He did not grow or decay or slide into uselessness
the way that the changes of the living did. He was simply and subtly what he
always wanted to be, and resistance to him was weak because the others had to
work through clumsy materials, while Nihil dwelt solely and simply in a realm
of will. He was the voice of the dead, the will of the dead as they had always
wanted to be.

�� Draco
thought he would die if he had to take much more of this, this relentless
crushing and pounding. Or he would simply turn into powder and become one of
Nihil�s servants and weapons. He could see how it happened now. Aran had
probably resisted; Dearborn might have tried to keep some sense of a separate
identity. But that grinding maw took them in, and when they came out again,
they�d been digested.

�� This was how to move. This was how to
change. Nihil would teach him, and he would no longer be what he had been, a
spirit in a body. He would be the changes of death locked in a body that he
need no longer fear to leave, because it would never decay�

�� Something
heavy struck him. Draco opened his eyes and stared into the darkness, wondering
whether it would be worthwhile to cry out, because this sensation was at least
different from the ones that he had experienced so far.

�� The blow
came again. Draco turned his head�and it did seem that he had a head again,
after long moments of being an aching, useless set of separated pieces in the
dark. He could feel that the blow was coming from the side, while the cold and
the pounding of Nihil�s teeth had seemed to come from straight ahead.

�� Help!� he
called, just in case.

�� The blow
came again, and then the darkness tore into light and color, and a swarm of
snakes moving over him.

�� Draco tried
not to tense and throw the snakes off. He didn�t think they were here to hurt
him. In fact, remembering that Harry could speak to snakes and use them as
illusions in his spells, he was virtually certain that they weren�t.

�� A snarl
seemed to roll all around him, or perhaps it was only a dense vibration of the
kind that Draco imagined he would hear if he was inside a mouth when it
snarled. Nihil�s teeth began to draw him in again. Draco struggled and opened
his arms to the snakes. If his own will could make a difference in this
contest, he would give it to them and gladly.

�� He did
think that he saw another snake shoot past overhead, something glowing green
and blue and black. He hoped that it was attacking Nihil, since it pushed straight
into the maw trying to devour him and didn�t come back.

�� For a
moment, Draco reflected, in humiliation, that he wasn�t going to get the chance
to matter or be powerful this time.

�� Then he
smiled, and began to fight even harder, hoping that he was distracting Nihil
from the war he had with Harry. He did have something to offer, something
different and valuable, if he could get out of Nihil�s trap alive.

�� He knew
what Nihil saw in death, what he could do there, what the source of his power
was. Probably no one else had ever come this far and then managed to escape;
they had been transformed into part of Nihil instead. Draco might not have the
magic to fight Nihil, but he had the knowledge.

�� He lunged
against his bonds, and felt the ice gripping him hesitate and draw back,
lessening. Immediately he sat up and flung himself along with the retreating
swarm of snakes in the direction of light.

�� Or, at
least, in the direction that was the opposite of Nihil. Draco wouldn�t mind if
he found out that it was full of darkness, as long as it was a different kind of darkness from the one that was
eating him.

*

�� Harry had
no idea what he was doing, but that had never stopped him before. He hadn�t
been sure how his death would defeat Voldemort, either, since if he had died
that would have got rid of the Horcrux but not killed him.

�� But he had
walked into the Forbidden Forest and stood in front of Voldemort to receive the
Killing Curse anyway, and now he was pouring himself into the battle with Nihil
the same way.

�� The brown
snakes danced around Draco, and where they danced, the darkness pulled back.
Harry still wasn�t sure what it was
about his magic that Nihil couldn�t stand. If Portillo Lopez was right and
there was a combination of life and death in his magic, presumably Nihil
couldn�t bear the life part.

�� And the
cobra sank its fangs into the darkness and thrashed back and forth, shaking it
to pieces, swallowing the cold that Nihil tried to feed it and dissipating it.
The cobra wasn�t real, only an illusion supercharged by Harry�s imagination and
blood, and it couldn�t be hurt in the same way that a living creature
swallowing that darkness would.

�� Nihil
screamed. Harry shuddered as the ripples passed his ears, and then decided that
he didn�t have to care about the sound. He was going to rescue Draco and hurt
Nihil badly enough to convince him to retreat. Everything else could wait.

�� The brown
snakes were pulling Draco with them now. It was easier, and Harry didn�t know
why. Perhaps Draco had figured out they were friends and wasn�t fighting them,
which he thought would have made everything harder.

�� The cobra
bit and drank and swallowed, and still Nihil lashed at it ineffectually. Harry
wondered if Nihil could actually
learn how to fight a creature that combined life and death magic, and hoped
not.

�� I know you.

�� The icy
voice spoke from within his head, rather than brushing past it on the outside
as the shriek had. Harry shivered, but continued to pour the magic into his
blood and his illusions and concentrate on his battles.

�� I know that you are not different from me. I
know that you took up necromancy because you wanted the dead to return. The
voice altered, dipping down and growing softer, so that it sounded like the
voices Harry had sometimes used to argue with himself about necromancy in the
depths of the night. Have you forgotten
the duty you owe to them?

�� Harry
gritted his teeth. Yes, the temptation was still there, beating like a pulse
beneath the surface of his mind, but he knew where his duty lay, with the
living.

�� I wanted to rescue the living, too. I became
what I am because I wanted to rescue my brother. I suffered at the hands of
Death Eaters, like you. Why are we so different? Look me in the eye, and I
could tell you what I am. Perhaps you would find sympathy in me. Perhaps we
would come to understand each other.

�� Harry
focused on Draco. He thought Draco was almost to him, wherever that was. The
small brown snakes were losing some of their strength as they got closer,
because Harry had only created them to find Draco, and their work was almost
done.

�� Would the dead want you to give up the
chance to summon them back to life? Sirius Black�s life was cut short, and he
would want to live. Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks�wouldn�t it be right for them
to return and live out their lives as parents of their child? I can do nothing
about their natural deaths in time, but these were unnatural. Come, let me
summon them. I know where their spirits must rest.

�� You can�t
do that,� Harry muttered between clenched teeth, and then wanted to tell
himself off for listening to Nihil. He had to pull. He had to bite. He had to
be ready to draw the snake illusions back into himself and disengage from the
battle, though he wasn�t at all sure how he would do that.

�� Yes, I can. Nihil�s voice was almost
gentle now. I own this sea. I swim in it
as you swim in the sea of life, all unconscious, unknowing of what you do. But
I am a double-sided creature, and I know.

�� The
darkness flickered in front of Harry, and he saw the faces of the spirits as he
had seen them waiting on the other side in the one pure necromantic ritual he
had ever performed. Sirius was leaning forwards, his eyes yearning, the way
Harry imagined he must have looked when he was breaking out of Azkaban. Remus
and Tonks leaned on each other, robes blowing around them in an unnatural wind.
Fred wasn�t far behind them, giving Harry an uncertain smile and mouthing words
that Harry turned his head away from.

�� You would disdain them? Nihil�s voice
dripped with sugary disappointment. Then
I am sure that you will not care if I do this.

�� Whips
lunged down from above and slammed into Remus and Tonks, driving them to their
knees. A hot knife scraped the skin from Sirius�s back. Fred was twisted as
though someone had him in two giant hands, and Harry saw his head pop from his
shoulders.

�� Harry bit
his tongue. Blood was running down his chin, and he focused through it,
reaching out to Draco again with pure magic.

�� I chose the living.

�� Nihil�s
voice said something in his ears, faint and far away, but Harry didn�t listen
to it. He had hold of Draco now, with snakes and with spirit, and was pulling
on him so hard that he thought he might have been able to reel him in even if
Draco was resisting.

�� The cold
wind flickered around his hair and ears, the way it had when he first
approached the tent. Nihil snarled, and Harry felt it reverberate through his
bones. His vision danced with the images of the dead.

�� I will not forget this, Nihil said.

�� I thought
you never forgot anything,� Harry gasped, and the words were no sooner out of
his mouth than he felt Nihil�s hold on Draco loosen. Draco practically slammed
into him, and his snakes faded, and together they fell out of the darkness that
Nihil had drawn Draco into.

�� One more
time, coldness touched Harry�s ears like snowflakes, and Nihil whispered, I have thought, and studied. And I have
decided. You will be destroyed in the same way as all the others who stand to
oppose me.

�� Harry would
have liked to say that he�d never expected any special treatment, but they were
back in light, and Gregory was kneeling over them demanding an explanation.
Harry opened his eyes and saw Nusquam sagging forwards in her bonds. He
couldn�t see her face and didn�t know if she was still physically present or
not, but he didn�t see that it mattered as long as she wasn�t moving.

�� Draco, and
Gregory, were the more pressing concerns to deal with.

*

�� Of all the
sensations Draco had missed, the greatest was warmth.

He huddled against Harry�s body,
listening to his heartbeat and the way he shivered and sighed when he spoke to
Gregory. He was grateful that Harry�s hand never ceased stroking his hair, and
that Harry seemed to know instinctively that Draco needed his heat, because he
never moved away, either.

Draco imagined that they made an
undignified picture, sprawled on the floor of the tent, draped over each other
as though Gregory had caught them in the act of making love. For once, he
didn�t care, couldn�t care. He
tightened his grip on Harry�s arm, and Harry squeezed his hand once and then
went back to answering questions. Draco reckoned he should listen to the
questions and try to comprehend how they related to him. He was past the first
moments of needing extreme comfort now.

�I want you to tell me what you did,� said Gregory. Draco smiled in
spite of himself. That was Gregory, requiring information so that she could
duplicate or at least understand every action that someone else took.

�It�s hard to describe,� Harry said
tiredly. �You know that I�ve been working with Portillo Lopez. She�s discovered
that my magic, the magic that I use when I�m supposedly performing necromancy,
is a mixture of the forces of life and death. Nihil could take control of me or
fight me easily if I only used one or the other, but not both. I used my blood
and the illusions of snakes, which respond to Parseltongue, to reach after
Draco and to bring him back.� His hands tightened on Draco�s shoulders. Draco
tilted his head so that his brow rested against Harry�s chest. He understood
all the things he knew Harry would find it difficult to put into words.

�� Back,�
said Gregory, as though that innocent word was the key to fighting Nihil and
Harry was wrong to hide it from her. �Where did he go? I could see his body
kneeling here all the time you supposedly fought for him.�

�� Where do
you go when you dream?� Harry snapped, and Draco would have liked to applaud
the retort, if only his arms weren�t so tired. �It was a place like that. In
mind, in imagination, or something more. I know that I stopped Nihil from
consuming Draco and stopped him from taking my mind over. That�s all I care
about right now.�

�� Draco
thought that the right place to clear his throat and join the conversation. �We
have something more,� he said.

�� Oh, thank
God you�re still sane,� Harry said, in a rush of emotion dense enough that
Draco wasn�t surprised it made his voice thick, and then bowed his head. Draco
felt more than one drop of salt water on his face. He found Harry�s hand and
squeezed it back. He would have to do something nice for Harry�for them
both�after Gregory was done interrogating them. And he thought he knew what,
though it would require him to rest first.

�� Yes, I
am,� Draco said. �More than that. Nihil told me certain things about what it
was like to be behind death, and what he was, and I escaped with them. I can�t
imagine that�s common.�

�� What is
he?� Gregory switched her targets in a moment, from Harry to him. Draco twisted
around to face her, glad that his shivering body remained in contact with
Harry. He honestly didn�t think he could stand on his own right now.

�� Something
that controls the change behind death,� Draco said. �Portillo Lopez had told us
that change separated life and death, that death is made of stillness and life
of growth. But apparently there�s a different kind of transformation that Nihil
exploits when he moves spirits from body to body or creates new people from
himself, like Nusquam. He told me it was like the movement an insect might experience
in amber.�

�� But
insects in amber don�t move.� Gregory frowned at him as if she thought he was
trying to make a fool of her.

�� No one can
survive death the way Nihil can, either,� Draco snapped. �It�s a paradox, and
we�ll have to treat it that way and use it for what we can, rather than
rejecting it because it can�t exist.�

�� Gregory
paused, then, to Draco�s utter surprise, dipped her head to him. �You are
right,� she said. �I apologize.�

�� Draco would
have gaped at Harry, inviting him to share his surprise, if they were alone. As
it was, Harry seemed to take the apology for a break in the interrogation, and
curled his arms around Draco, helping him to his feet. �We�re going back to our
tent now,� he said firmly, �to sleep through the rest of our evening.�

�� Gregory
smiled. �I don�t blame you. I shall secure Nusquam, if she lives.�

�� As they
left the tent, Draco realized that he didn�t care at all if Nusquam was still
alive. Perhaps he should be bothered by that, but considering she�d never been
properly alive in the first place, he wasn�t.

�� Are you
really all right?� Harry whispered as they limped and staggered along. �Draco,
I was so worried��

�� Draco
raised his head, gripped Harry�s chin, and kissed him by way of response. He
made sure to use his tongue as much as he could when he was this exhausted, to
lick the back of Harry�s teeth and to bite at his lips. When he pulled back,
Harry looked pleasantly dazed.

�� Yes, I�m
well,� Draco whispered. �Simply tired. Thank you.�

�� Harry
kissed him behind the ear and helped him the rest of the way to their tent,
where they fell into bed together. Draco had planned to remain awake and spin a
few devious plots to ensure Harry got all the rewards he deserved.

�� He managed
about half of one before he fell asleep.

��

*

�� polka dot: I
imagine Hermione probably left Crookshanks with her parents.

�� angelmuziq:
Thanks! In this case, Draco was lying, so rather than giving away real plans to
Nusquam, he was telling her things that he hoped would irritate her into
reacting.

�� Dragons
Breath: Harry can best use the connection in moments of pain, and he had no
particular reason to think Draco was in danger until he felt that pain.

�� Thanks for
reviewing.

�� MewMew2:
Thank you!
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Seasons of War