Title: Seasons of War

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.

Seasons of War

Chapter One—Hard at Work

"How much do you understand of the theory of necromancy, Trainee Potter?"

Harry tried to decide whether or not he was irritated by Battle Healer Portillo Lopez's cool tone, and then decided that it didn't really matter. She was the one in charge here, the one who was supposed to work with him to create a Parseltongue-based necromancy that he could teach to other people. And Harry knew almost nothing about how his own gift worked, let alone about this kind of magic in other people.

"Not much," he admitted, leaning forwards to stretch his hands above the fire between them. They had Warming Charms on, but still he swore he could feel the cold wind blowing on them from the open camp. There was less snow in the camp today, which didn't keep the chill from biting at them. They were in the middle of winter, after all. He and Portillo Lopez were seated on hard wooden chairs Harry thought had been devised specifically for their discomfort, and in a warded circle so that no one who came near them could hear what they were talking about. "Just that it's supposed to be a way of talking to the dead, but the necromancers usually end up commanding them."

"That will do as a beginning." Portillo Lopez looked absolutely comfortable, of course, and as if she didn't even need the headscarf that she usually wore draped above her hair. "Why do you suppose that so many necromancers become corrupt?"

Harry shook his head. "I don't know. The books didn't tell me."

Portillo Lopez smiled, which looked as though it was happening in spite of her better judgment. "Books cannot tell you everything you will need to know, especially since your magic is outside their common scope. Use your reason."

Harry bit his tongue on the desire to say that lots of people had told him his reason was deficient. He should work with Portillo Lopez as best he could. The Aurors knew, now, how much he and Draco had hidden from them and how often they'd taken off on their own. They were on thin ice.

Harry looked into the fire, and thought a bit before answering, "Because it's a Dark Art, and the Dark Arts tend to corrupt people with the thrill of forbidden power?"

"Are you asking me or telling me?" Harry had had other teachers, such as Snape, who would have asked that question, too, but he didn't think he'd ever had anybody who was so good at sounding neutral and being irritating at the same time.

"Telling you, I reckon." Harry looked at her and shrugged. "I just don't know. When I was using normal necromancy, my main concern was to make sure that I didn't get caught, and I used my own blood and body as the sacrifices it needed because I couldn't dream of sacrificing anyone else. Are you sure that you should be asking a necromancer about why he does what he does?" he couldn't help adding. "Or shouldn't you tell me, because you're the expert in necromancy?"

Portillo Lopez gave a little sigh and folded her hands in a new position. "You are the only necromancer we have ever seen, Trainee Potter, who has gone on so surprising a course."

"Well, I know that," said Harry, mystified. Everyone else said Portillo Lopez was a clear teacher. Why don't I understand her, then? "Since I use Parseltongue and not Latin and everything."

Portillo Lopez gave another tiny sigh. "You are unusual in other respects. For not trying to practice the art after you were caught except at the urging of others, and for not immediately using others' blood."

"I think you're probably wrong," Harry said, because he couldn't believe that he was really that much more moral than other people. "You told me you don't often catch up with necromancers until they get to the stage where they're raising armies of the living dead and slaughtering people, and then their memories are clouded. So probably there are lots of them who go a few steps in and then stop."

"The traditional theories say that it is difficult to do so, because of the call of the dead and, yes, the seductive power of any Dark Art." Portillo Lopez rearranged her hands again. Harry looked at them so he didn't have to look into her eyes, which he felt were judging him constantly. Scars crossed and crisscrossed the brown skin there and split her knuckles, and Harry found himself wondering if those came from her work as a Healer or her other job as part of an Order that assassinated necromancers when it found them. "I have a different theory." She paused.

Harry refrained from rolling his eyes, but it was hard. "What is it, Auror?"

"That necromancy is the kind of magic that complements Healing," said Portillo Lopez. "Many of those who begin their training as Healers find themselves obsessively drawn along, learning procedures they never meant to. Few of those at St. Mungo's are trained in only one kind of Healing, did you know that? I think only among the Mind-Healers are there many specialists, and that often happens because they must take years to learn what they know. They have no time to pick up multiple methods of wrapping wounds, or learning how to cure certain spells or poisons."

"But then all you have is two cases of similar obsession," Harry said. "That doesn't prove they're anything alike, or give me any data, since I don't know why Healers are so obsessive."

Portillo Lopez's smile might have had a little more strained patience this time. "The Healers are drawn on because of the need to serve life," she said. "That much is commonly accepted. When you feel the raw force of life itself flowing through your fingers, knitting skin and bone together or removing a botched potion from someone's system, then you wish to continue. And of course, most of the candidates for Healer positions genuinely wish to help others.

"With necromancy, one does not have the same options, of course, but one does have the same contact with raw forces. In this case, it is the coldness and the stillness of corpses, the lack of change that separates the dead from the living." Portillo Lopez cocked her head, eyes glinting. "Not all my fellow Order members agree with me. But there are some people who are more susceptible to that call, I believe, just as there are those who are almost doomed to become Healers."

"So what happened with me?" Harry asked. He had to admit this idea made more sense to him than some of the books he had read, although he didn't know what proof Portillo Lopez really had. "Why didn't I give in to death?"

"Two reasons." Portillo Lopez lifted two fingers. "Either one may be true, or perhaps both. I am not sure.

"The first." She folded down one finger. "You are simply too committed to life to give in as many others do. You could give up your life for someone else, I know that, but in the meantime, you live it impulsively. You have experienced more in your young years than other wizards, too, which may help. I would not be surprised," she added in a musing tone, "if the incidence of necromancers in the next generation drops. So many of them experienced the war, and that brings them into contact with death and makes it horribly, frighteningly real, not the abstraction it often is for those under fifty."

Harry nodded, not sure what else he could add to that, or say.

"The other possibility is the one I saw written on your skin when Holder performed her little spell." Portillo Lopez could never speak about Holder without a twitch in her jaw, but she did sound calmer this time, as compared to others. "Return. You died and then came back to life, didn't you?"

Harry scowled at her. "I don't know," he said. "I really don't. I thought I did, but no one comes back from the Killing Curse, do they? And don't say anything about this," he added, tapping his scar. "My mother's love was what protected me, not some miraculous ability to get resurrected."

Portillo Lopez shook her head. "Life and death are more mysterious than we often consider them," she said. "Necromancy proves that the absolute barriers are not so absolute. And that is what will help us develop weapons against Nihil."

"What will?" Harry demanded. "I think he knows that those barriers are flimsy. He goes back and forth between them like curtains all the time."

"But his essential nature does not change," said Portillo Lopez, with a slow smile. "And change is the condition of life, of the body, as it is not of the spirit. I believe it is the key to your art as well."

"Because snakes are living things?" Harry knew he was guessing in the dark, but he had no idea what Portillo Lopez was saying.

"In part," Portillo Lopez said. Harry contained his impatient sigh by biting his lips. It seemed that every answer he came up with was only partially right. "And snakes shed their skins, changing their bodies in a way that an entity like Nihil cannot understand any longer."

"He changes bodies." Harry's head was beginning to hurt.

"But not in the same way." Portillo Lopez tapped her fingers on her knee, her nails sounding as though they were grating on bone. "And then there is the non-material nature of the illusions that you worked with to create your first necromancy effect, as compared to the material nature of the bodies that Nihil prefers to occupy or place souls under his control within."

Harry resigned himself to a headache, and to a longer conversation before they managed to do anything worth the doing. He hoped that Draco was having more luck.

Then he remembered who Draco was working with and winced.

I doubt that any luck I can wish him is enough for the situation.

"Things would go much more easily for you if you would cooperate with me, Trainee Malfoy."

Draco was grateful, in a way he had never been before, for those long hours of trying to please his father, either by doing perfectly the first time tasks Lucius had never explained to him before or remaining calm and still when he was a child who wanted to make noise. It was the only reason Alice Holder was alive rather than dead at his hand in a fit of abject frustration.

She stood in front of him in one of the smaller tents that filled the camp, her hands wrapped around her wand and her eyes never moving from his face. Draco knew why. The Head Auror's attack dog was still convinced that he and Harry had been up to no good, even when they'd explained everything—well, almost everything—and she was waiting for the moment when he gave up the "good" disguise and leaped for her throat.

Keep this up and you'll see a demonstration sooner than you'd like, Draco thought, but reminded himself that that was the way she wanted him to act and think. He would retain his independence and his tranquility. In the end, he knew, that would hurt her much worse than anything else he could do.

"I'm trying, Auror Holder," he said. "But perhaps you could explain your requests to me again? I didn't understand them the first time, which is entirely my fault, I'm sure."

Holder turned away, to the flap of the tent, and looked out of it as if she didn't trust the trainees and the Aurors working with them not to blow each other up without her presence. Draco took the moment to study her back for weaknesses. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be any. Her balance was perfect, and he had already seen that she knew more and nastier spells than most Aurors.

"It is simple enough," Holder said, her speech as patterned as a tile floor. "I want to know what torture you think is necessary to break your partner."

Draco bowed his head. "And that is the point where my understanding fails, Auror," he said, imitating her tone, though not closely enough to count as mockery. He achieved his purpose, anyway, making her turn her head to look at him with narrowed eyes, suspicious but unsure. "Why would you need to know how to break Harry? I thought I was supposed to discuss, with you, torture techniques that would be useful on Nihil's underlings. He is the one who has the extreme fear of torture, after all."

"Your partner is a necromancer," Holder said. "The application from one to the other ought to make sense even to you."

"A necromancer of a different type than Nihil is," Draco said, lifting his head. "Or there would be no point in having him work with Battle Healer Portillo Lopez." He gave most people their full titles around Holder, for the same reason he'd done it around Professor Snape.

"I wish to know general techniques as well as specific ones," Holder said, and her wand spun once in her hands. "Tell me."

Draco spent a moment composing himself. Yes, the request enraged him, annoyed him, and made him want to jab his own wand into Holder's throat. But doing all that would mean giving in to the feelings she was trying to stir in him. He would be better off if he simply managed to lie to her.

And win more of a victory, as well. Power was more crucial in these circumstances that any others where Draco had ever wanted it.

"You must know," Draco said, lowering his voice so it would become portentous and widening his eyes to the limit he thought he could manage without Holder thinking him an actor, "that Harry survived a lot during the war. The worst Voldemort and his minions could do to him was as nothing to him." As a matter of fact, he knew that Harry had escaped torture at least in Malfoy Manor and during the final battle. Granger was the one who had suffered his aunt's tender mercies at the Manor. But what right did Holder have to that knowledge?

Holder nodded back to him. "I was, in fact, aware of that, Trainee Malfoy."

Draco glared, not thinking she would take it amiss, since she already knew that he resented working with her. "Well, it takes unusual torture to wring much of a response from him. For example, drawing a small amount of blood from his finger would work."

Holder's rising eyebrows were as eloquent a demand for an explanation as words would have been. Draco obliged. "Necromancers use blood in their rituals," he said. "Losing even a little bit of blood makes them panic. Harry's the same way."

"I knew there was no great difference between them," Holder said, a mere breath behind her words. "What else?"

"The anticipation of torture can do a lot on its own." This statement had more basis in reality than the notion of pricking a necromancer's finger, and Draco closed his eyes as he remembered the look in Aran's eyes—well, the eyes of the man who had once been Aran—as he leaned back against the wall in the room where he had died. "Threaten enough, and Nihil's people may at least spill secrets. They know that they don't have his ability to pass through death and come into a new body, unless he grants it to them, and he doesn't do that for everyone. The spell I used was a strangling one. Simple torture, but effective."

"I will remember that," said Holder. "And I will remember how good you are at this, Malfoy."

"Thank you, Auror," Draco said meekly. He waited until she left the tent before he turned and sought out parchment and ink. This was the tent he and Harry had been granted, as partners, and Draco had taken on the task of organizing it and—not that anyone but Harry knew this—regularly summoning a house-elf from the Manor to make sure fresh supplies were always in reach.

Draco wanted to work with the Aurors. He wanted to complete his training. He wanted to see Nihil defeated. But nowhere in that group of desires was the desire to be bullied and threatened and asked what kinds of torture might work on his partner.

Holder might genuinely believe that Harry was a threat. She might want to make sure that there was a way of stopping him if he ever behaved the way she manifestly expected a necromancer to behave. Draco didn't think she was evil in the same sense that Nihil was; her loyalty was to Head Auror Robards.

But he still hadn't agreed to this, and he wouldn't be her toy or her pawn in a power struggle against Harry. He wrote a letter explaining the situation in a few lines, and then whistled softly.

Flash, Harry's fire-dancer, lay asleep in a corner of the tent, but he opened one eye and lifted his head when he saw Draco looking at him. Beside him, Politesse, the small scorpion-tailed dog that Harry had acquired for Draco, lifted his head in turn, and then put it down again with a small whine when he realized that Draco wasn't trying to summon him.

"Sorry, you're too distinctive, and you don't have wings," Draco told him. "Flash can go fast enough that most people won't realize he's not an owl." He extended the letter. "Will you take this to the large field on the outside of camp for me, and give it to the woman who's leading them?"

Flash took his time sitting up and shaking out his wings, as if to show that he owed only provisional loyalty to Draco as Harry's partner. Draco didn't mind the wait. He was still too pleased with himself for getting Harry a companion who could accompany him into battle—when he was allowed to do so—and with both animals for surviving Nihil's attack on the trainee barracks. They had fled to Granger and Weasley and shadowed them all the way to the training camp.

"Thank you," Draco said quietly, when Flash leaped up from his perch on the back of their bed and flew over to take the letter. Flash beat his brilliant wings once in irritated acknowledgement and then soared out the top of the tent.

Politesse came over and stood swishing his tail back and forth, while staring at Draco. Draco picked up the little dog and held him close, stroking his short grey fur. Politesse sighed in response and turned his head to watch the way Holder had gone.

"I don't like her either," Draco agreed. "But we only need to work for her at the moment. I think she'll be very interested in working with me once we explain the situation to her."

Politesse lowered his chin to rest on Draco's arm in response. Draco stroked his fur and watched the tent flap, waiting.

He didn't have long to waste in that. The flap pulled back abruptly and Auror Gregory stepped in, asking as she came, "Is there a reason that you wished to interrupt my practice with my students?"

Draco eyed her for a moment without answering. Gregory was like Holder in the haughtiness of her expression and the way she moved that betrayed her training, but Draco had never seen her keep her temper under provocation as Holder had done this morning, or so coldly respond to someone. She had launched curses at him when she thought Draco was working with Dearborn, one of Nihil's identities, and already corrupted by him. She took some delight in taunting people who didn't know what they were doing. Draco had to admit that Jennifer Morningstar, the Auror who had taken her place as Combat teacher when Gregory fled the Aurors, was probably a better instructor, but he knew where he stood with Gregory.

If I can persuade her to stand in the same place. But since she hated Nihil, Draco thought he could.

"I was with Holder," he said. "She wanted to know what torture techniques would work on Nihil, since he formed out of an experience of torture."

"I heard that much." Gregory's hair swished against her cheek as she nodded. "But what does that have to do with me?"

Draco leaned forwards, ignoring the way Politesse growled. Even though Gregory's attack had happened before Draco acquired Politesse, the dog seemed to regard her as a menace. "She also sought to make me tell her what sorts of torture would work against Harry."

Gregory snored. "Despite what you might think, Malfoy, going against your precious Potter does not automatically make one evil."

"But it wastes time," Draco said. "I know now that it won't matter to Holder, and probably not to Robards, how many professions of loyalty we give, and how often we obey them. They'll still treat us like outsiders. I want more power than they'll give me. I think you can help me with that."

Gregory studied him. "And what do I get out of it?"

"A way to defeat Nihil," Draco said. "I'm certain that he's afraid of torture, but I need someone who won't try to use the information I give against my partner in the mistaken belief that any two necromancers are the same."

"I could decide to torture Potter," Gregory said. "You never know."

Draco laughed openly at her. "You don't do sly well. And I think that you're more concerned about Nihil than about us, as long as we don't turn traitor to your precious Aurors."

"There's that, isn't there?" Gregory had a bright stare when she wanted to use it, like a blackbird's. "Very well. But I hardly think that Holder and Robards will let you stop helping her. What are you going to do about that?"

"Feed her false information," Draco said. "Work with you to develop the real techniques. As long as you think you'll have the stomach for it."

Gregory's smile flickered for a minute. "I didn't always keep ahead of Nihil's spies and fighters, and the ones he sent after me weren't always the living dead," she said. "One of them caught up with us and killed two of the trainees I'd recruited by making them swallow their own lungs. I staked him down and cut his lungs out, then kept him alive with certain other spells while I fed him the lungs piece by piece. I think I can do this, Malfoy."

Draco nodded, more impressed than he wanted to show—though he let one gleam of it through, so he wouldn't think he was discounting her. "I'm convinced."

"Good." Gregory whirled and strode out of the tent.

Politesse growled again. Draco stroked his head and shut his eyes, leaning back. One part of his plan—how to develop his weapon against Nihil without going through the frankly hostile Holder—accomplished.

Now he had to discover how to get on the front lines and continue developing into the war leader he knew he could be.