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Ceremonies of Strife	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16217 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this writing.

Chapter List
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Title: Ceremonies
of Strife

Disclaimer: J. K.
Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun
and not profit.

Pairings: Harry/Draco,
Ron/Hermione, Lucius/Narcissa

Rating: R

Warnings: Violence,
Dark magic, angst, profanity, sex (slash and het),
character deaths (not the main characters).

Summary: Sequel
to Soldier�s Welcome. As Harry and
Draco head in to their second year of Auror training, they are resolved to try
and balance the relationship between them with their personal difficulties.
That might be a bit harder than they think when the difficulties include necromancy,
Azkaban escapees, unicorn ghosts, the risen dead, a secret order of
assassins�and the second war, guided by Nihil.

Author�s Notes: This
is the second part of what I�m calling the Running to Paradise Trilogy, focused
on Harry and Draco�s Auror training. A reader on AFF called SP777 suggested the
idea for this series to me. I�d advise you to read Soldier�s Welcome first before you try to read this one, as this
story doesn�t spend a lot of time recapitulating the first one.

Ceremonies of Strife

Chapter One�Harder
Than You Think

�� I thought
you would wish to hear the story of how I made my escape, son.�

�� Draco
looked up. His father stood in the entrance of the sitting room he�d chosen as
his sanctuary, a distantly amused look on his face. That look said he knew that
Draco was hiding from him, but he would tolerate such foolishness as long as it
produced no material hurt to the family.

�� Draco took
a deep breath and sat up. He had prepared himself for this moment. That didn�t
lessen how hard it actually was to visit it, but it also didn�t lessen the necessity for facing it.

�� Of course,
Father,� he said calmly. �The last escapes I remember were orchestrated by the Dark
Lord, and I must admit I am curious why the Department of Magical Law
Enforcement is not yet knocking on our doors.�

�� That
Department,� whispered Lucius, but he said nothing more, not even when Draco
raised an eyebrow to invite him to continue. He strode into the sitting room
and took the only other seat, a chair opposite Draco�s, while looking around
him with the expression of slow contemplation that had raised Draco�s hackles
even as a child.

�� Draco
leaned back in his chair and tried not to let the expression disconcert him
now. Most of the d�cor in this room was original to the Manor: the marble
walls, the silver sconces for torches on the walls, the smooth green and white
stone that framed the fireplace. The only additions Draco had made were the
shelves that contained his books�themselves plain ebony, absolutely
unobjectionable�and the chairs, which had been straight and wooden when he took
them over. This had been a room meant to encourage inopportune visitors to
leave again. Draco had Transfigured the chairs into
substantially more comfortable ones with thick cushions and subdued but
brilliant colors.

�� Lucius
perhaps found enough to satisfy him, because he leaned back in the chair,
settled his shoulders only once against the cloth, and then said, �But first,
we have something to speak of.�

�� Draco met
his eyes stolidly. He could think of only two things that would cause his
father to speak in that tone, that tone that said he was uncertain of Draco�s
obedience, and offended because he had to be uncertain. Either Draco�s work as
an Auror, or his relationship with Harry, had probably come to his father�s
attention.

�� It is
folly,� Lucius said quietly. �You must know that.�

�� I do not
know what you speak of,� Draco returned in the same tone, and saw his father
pause. He would not have done that before the war, and Lucius had been in Azkaban
since his trial. Draco could practically see his father revising what he knew
of his son and making the careful, necessary changes on the scroll of his mind.

�� This
decision to train as an Auror,� Lucius said. �Your mother tells me that you saw
it as a road to power.�

�� That,�
Draco said, �and one of the few things that would make people cease to distrust
me based on my family name.�

�� Lucius
leaned forwards, face flushing slightly. Draco raised an eyebrow. That meant
his father was more in earnest than he had thought, and he prepared to listen
to the words with more interest and less sense that the conclusion of the
conversation was foregone.

�� But that
distrust is your glory, Draco, do you not understand?� Lucius whispered.
�Distrust is only a few steps from fear. And the Malfoy name should be feared,
held as a dagger to the throat of those who might oppose us, gliding like a
specter along their skin when they think of a course of action that they know
would bring them into conflict with our family.�

�� Draco could
remember a time, before the war, or even during it, when such talk as this
would have impressed him. Lucius could use metaphors, yes.

�� But his
fine talk hadn�t stopped him from going to prison, or�and this was more
important to Draco�serving the Dark Lord. There had been little that Lucius
could do to persuade the Wizengamot that he wasn�t guilty when he wore the
brand of his guilt on his arm. But it had been his choice to sink to one knee
before the Dark Lord and kiss the hem of his robe, and Draco was never going to
forget that.

�� You talk of power, of being feared rather
than loved, but you were the one who gave up the Malfoy power when you chose the
Dark Lord. And I know that he didn�t threaten you, Father. You chose it in the
service of greater power. If you can
betray the ideals of our family in that way, I will not allow you to talk me
out of my decision, which was made in the same freedom.

�� But Draco
said nothing of that. He simply nodded and said, �Yes, sir. I know that many of
our ancestors have done the same thing and thought the same thing.�

�� The
ambiguity in his words slipped past his father�s ears (indeed, Draco wondered
if he had the ability to notice it). Lucius smiled. Draco had once lived for
that smile and the warmth it lent a face colder than the marble walls and
floors of the Manor.

�� Good. Then
you know that you must tell the Ministry you will not be returning to the Auror
program in September.�

�� Draco bowed
his head. Let his father take it for agreement. It was not, but Draco had
learned to conserve his strength when the battles looked hopeless. For months,
he had refrained from demanding answers from Harry even though he would have
liked to, and patiently put together what he already knew from the little clues
that Harry dropped about himself. He could make his father content now and look
for the moment when his guard would fall.

�� Good, my
son,� Lucius said softly. He leaned back in the chair, which, Draco realized
now, he�d been poised to rise from. Draco turned his head slightly to the side
to conceal his smile. What would he have
done if I refused? Was he going to strangle me right here? �And now I will
tell you the tale of my escape.�

�� But he
didn�t, not right away. He called a house-elf instead and ordered hot
chocolate, spiced with things that Draco didn�t recognize the name of. Draco
leaned back in his chair and did his best to appear both drowsy and slightly
discontent. His father would be less suspicious of rebellion at the moment,
since he probably expected Draco to assent to his declaration but still resent
it.

��

Draco wondered if the greater
surprise was that he hadn�t considered obeying, not for one moment. Lucius was
still the head of the family. He was still Draco�s father. He had been Draco�s
idol. And even though he wasn�t anymore, Draco thought that he should still
come to some sort of an accommodation with him.

But right now, his obstinacy was
quiet and soft and implacable as a snowdrift. He was not going to do what his
father told him. He hadn�t considered that for a moment. He would not consider
it now.

When the chocolate was spiced to
his father�s satisfaction, Lucius took a sip, nodded, and began.

�� I have
always kept my skill at illusions secret,� he said. �It wasn�t reckoned
something to be proud of when I was at Hogwarts. There, the emphasis was on
curses, the powerful, flashy spells. Illusion was considered something weak
because it was so small and didn�t take much effort.�

�� Draco
nodded obediently. He had learned a bit about that in Dearborn�s Defensive and Offensive Magic
class. Illusions could be woven with easy incantations�as long as one didn�t
mind them looking like mists or transparent scarves. Deeper, stronger work was
needed to create glamours that would reliably imitate
human faces or the presence of animals and walls, but work so fine that it was
as difficult as trying to weave a spiderweb when one
wasn�t used to it.

�� I had
thought that I might be able to create an illusion of myself that would breathe
and drink and sleep and die, if I ever needed to,� Lucius said, and his voice
swelled like some organ to fill the space of the sitting room. Draco found
himself smiling in spite of his private rebellion. His father had always had
some of the traits of the actor, and he was demonstrating them now. �I
practiced it until I could fool my eye. I could not, of course, use the real
thing in front of my enemies, but several times, during the first war and the
second, I darkened its hair slightly and placed it in sight of those who would
have reason to look long and hard. Each was satisfied that they saw a
dark-haired wizard dying.� A small smile played about his lips. �Some
recognized the Malfoy features and asked me if I had a distant cousin who might
have been on the battlefield.�

�� Draco
nodded again. He could admit that his father had been clever; that had never
been a problem. Indeed, he had continued to admire, from a chilly intellectual
distance, his father�s skill with spells and plots long after he had started to
distrust that he knew what was best for the family and for Draco�s future.

�� That
illusion was my prize,� Lucius said quietly, �my secret weapon. I could
recreate it through wandless magic. Of course I thought of it as soon as I went
to Azkaban. But what could I do? If I simply placed it in my cell, there was no
reason for the guards to open the door. I would have to do something to it to
make it seem as if it were sickening immediately�and even then, they might
laugh and leave the door shut, and in the meantime I would receive none of the
food I needed to outlast the time until they grew less cautious.

�� But at
last I had my chance. There was a guard I had been watching,
because he seemed to care so little for the prisoners when he came to feed us
that I might almost have slipped past him. I hoped that he would be in
attendance on me that night. But instead, the meal was late in arriving, and
then I heard shouts and footsteps pounding up the corridors. I concealed myself
in the corner and cast my illusion so that it lay in the center of the cell,
only grumbling and turning one shoulder to the noise as it appeared to go back
to sleep.�

�� Draco
inclined his head, lost in admiration. His father had always been quick to
seize the main chance and then act as if he had somehow foreknown that he would
need to do so. He couldn�t have known, not for sure, that this commotion would
lead to his being freed, and he could have risked his secret weapon for
nothing. But that had not happened, and now he was out of the cell.

�� Lucius
smiled back at him, apparently tracing every thought that raced through his
brain and appreciating them all. Draco lowered his eyes. His satisfaction about
the hidden, secret layer of his mind would give him away if he tried to meet
his father�s gaze too directly.

�� Sure
enough,� Lucius said with some relish, �it turned out to be what I needed. My
melancholy guard had killed himself. The humans in Azkaban have become a tight
little band since the Ministry got rid of the Dementors�what
else should they be, all alone and facing hundreds of prisoners on a desolate
island?�and none of them could believe they hadn�t noticed his intentions.
Their first thought was that a prisoner must have done it. So they checked our
cells, and even went so far as to come inside and make sure that none of us had
weapons.� His smile deepened. �And they were careless enough not to look far
into the shadows, and they were careless enough to leave the door of my cell
not completely locked.�

�� Draco
nodded again, not believing it for a second. If his father had mastered the
wandless magic necessary to cast such a complicated illusion, it was entirely
likely that he would have mastered some of the smaller spells, such as Alohomora. That he had not used them before this
was a measure of his patience as well as his cunning. He was determined that
there should not be pursuit.

�� Remember that, if you rise against him, Draco
told himself. And then he reconsidered, and added, Since there is no question but that this will be rebellion, remember it.

�� And so I left,� Lucius said, with a minute shrug of his shoulders,
�and left my illusion to sleep in the cell, slowly draining its life away.
It will last long enough to fool them. And then you will receive a sad letter
announcing my death, and you and Narcissa will put on mourning for a time.� A
smile that spread all along his lips and appeared to gather up every bit of
slyness he�d ever worn. �Then it will be time for me to start my new life.�

�� Though I
grant you have a certain amount of freedom once the whole world believes you to
be dead,� Draco said carefully, �there is also an inevitable restriction.�

�� Oh,�
Lucius said, with an airy wave of his hand that also didn�t fool Draco, �I am
sure I can use my skills to make the best of my limited situation.�

�� He can probably weave other glamours, Draco translated to himself. And he probably has investments that the
Ministry could never touch because it never knew about them.

�� He turned
his head as he heard a footstep outside the room and saw his mother putting her
head around the door. Her smile was gentle as she glanced back and forth
between the two of them. Draco wondered if he was the only one who saw that it
was also strained.

�� Lucius,�
she said quietly, �you promised that you would show me the extent of your
vaults in Gringotts, so that I can be prepared when
your death is announced.� She held up a stack of parchment.

�� That was wise, Draco thought. The
Ministry would almost certainly interfere when his father �died� and try to
take more than they ought from the vaults, or claim that, since Lucius had been
the head of the Malfoy family, that meant the rest of the family couldn�t claim
the money he had owned. It was nothing more than Draco would expect in a world
so hostile to former Death Eaters as this one was.

�� Then he
stopped, and tilted his head in private thought as Lucius nodded to him and
accompanied Narcissa out of the room. That was the first time in long months
that he had thought of the Ministry as an enemy. He had known that Nihil wanted
to kill him, and that Nihil had a grudge against Death Eaters, and he had known
that various people in the Auror program didn�t like him. But the Ministry as a
whole had been, instead, the institution that he was going to serve, once he
finished his training as an Auror.

�� Draco gave
a brief, barking laugh now, wondering if these tangled loyalties would destroy
him, if Lucius would succeed in changing him so that he thought less about
becoming an Auror and more about becoming a Malfoy, and if Lucius would really
relinquish so much of his power when Draco supposedly became head of the
family.

�� He couldn�t
answer those questions yet, and the uncertainty made the muscles in his stomach
clench. But he leaned back in his chair and told himself sternly to think about
other things.

�� Because two things were settled. He would not give up his
career in the Aurors, no matter what his father thought. It was one of the few
decisions he had ever made on his own, and it was his path to power and
prestige and a pride that did not depend on the fortunes or failures of other
wizards named Malfoy.

�� And he
would not give up Harry.

�� Some things
were his, his beyond doubting, no
matter what his father said.

*

�� Because all is black and darkness, all is
grey.

�� Harry blew
his fringe out of his eyes and shook his head in frustration. It was harder
than he had thought it would be to understand the necromancy book. The first
few pages had seemed straightforward enough; the author had declared that the
book would teach the reader how to raise the dead, how to command them, how to
make Inferi, and how to use the �magic of death� for
power. Harry hadn�t been interested in most of those�he already had more power
than he knew what to do with, unless he was using it to save and protect other
people�but he had smiled at the first claim and then turned the page.

�� There were
so many of them. So
many people who had died in the war, unfairly, with no chance to say farewell,
with no premonition that they were going to die. Harry just wanted to
give them one more chance. He didn�t think even Hermione would say that that
was wrong.

�� If it wasn�t necromancy.

�� Harry
shifted in his seat and then carefully ignored that part of his mind. He
couldn�t be sure about that. Not
absolutely sure.

�� The book
spoke with relish about the amount of power a necromancer could achieve and the
amount of fear he could cause, and Harry flicked past those pages in boredom. Then
came the start of chapter one. Harry had assumed that he could start reading
here, because, after all, since the book had said that it would teach someone
how to raise the dead first, the first chapter ought to be about that.

�� No such
thing. The first chapter was full of weird pronouncements, recipes for potions
that were somehow to be made without using a cauldron, riddles, and
instructions for harvesting human skin. Harry flicked through the pages in
growing disbelief, wondering why it had been written. It seemed like it wasn�t
someone�s private spellbook for recording
information, the way the Half-Blood Prince�s book had been Snape�s. After all,
there was the introduction saying it was meant to teach other people. But how
was anyone supposed to make sense of this mess?

�� Walk into the grey and extend your hands
before you. You will see your future on your left hand and your past on your
right.

�� What did
that mean?

�� Harry let
his head fall back against the couch and grumbled under his breath. All he
wanted to do was bring the dead back to life. Not such a grand desire. Not a
desire that the person who�d written the book could think was bad, or they
wouldn�t have written the book. But
trying to fulfill it with this thing was probably going to be impossible.

�� He hit the
cover of the book with one fist out of sheer frustration, and started to close
it.

�� A tingle of
sharp, Dark magic jolted through his hands. Harry
yelped and pulled them away, staring as the book fell to the floor.

�� For some
time, he let it sit there, studying the cover warily. Something had changed,
yes, but he couldn�t tell what it was. He could almost hear the scolding that
Hermione was sure to give him if she heard about this. Touching a book that Nihil probably left behind, in the middle of a
cave that was trapped so Draco almost died, and before that was used by Death
Eaters. Yes, Harry, that makes sense.

�� Not to
mention what Draco would say.

�� Harry
rubbed his shoulder uncomfortably. The book hadn�t touched him there�though he
thought he could still feel the pressure and the odd sting it had given his
palms�but he was imagining the way Draco would look at him, and then open his
mouth and begin to speak.

�� Or, worse,
the way he would simply close his eyes and turn his
head away, as if Harry was more trouble to deal with than he was worth.

�� Harry had
promised to stop risking his life so much. He had. He had promised not to try
and die if there was any other option. He had. But Draco would probably
consider that handling the book was breaking both promises.

�� Still�

�� Harry
swallowed. I just want them to have a
chance. No one ever gave Remus a chance. And Teddy
should know his mum. And Sirius ought to be able to see the world around him,
the world without Voldemort. And Colin, and Tonks�s dad, and Fred�

�� He at last
cast a shield charm that Dearborn
had taught them on his hands and leaned down to pick the book up. Now that he
was close to it, he could tell what was different. The cover had, before, been
entirely black except for the shabby remains of what might have been a gilt
circle. Now it bore letters gleaming in a sort of flat silver that left Harry
more uneasy than the blank cover had made him.

�� The Art of Summoning.

�� Harry
turned slowly through the pages, ready to drop the book and retreat at a
moment�s notice if it showed signs of being cursed. The introduction was the
same, but the first chapter now began in sentences of connected prose, instead
of the scattered recipes and riddles of before. Harry let his eyes rest on the
first paragraph, not really intending to read it.

�� The letters
were an odd, dark, rusty color, but he could read them easily enough.

�� To call back the dead, one must first have
the desire. The desire is the most important component of the summoning, and to
place them into a living body instead of to make them Inferi,
the desire must be stronger still.

�� Harry
blinked. He wondered if the book had changed and shown him its true self
because he had been, at that moment, yearning so strongly to bring people back
to life, more strongly than he had ever felt before when he held the book.

�� He read
further, and a slow coil of excitement rose in his stomach. Now the
instructions were straightforward. The book was still scattered with warnings
that this was dangerous, and could be even more dangerous than he imagined, but
at least he could read them now and judge for himself.

�� At least
now he had a chance.

�� And so do they.
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Ceremonies of Strife