Title: In Pursuit of Happiness

Author: Dark Raven Wrote

Fest: HD Cliche 2014

Rating: T

Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.

Warnings: None really, wartime fic?

Cliches: Voldemort Wins and Injury/Illness/Disability. It definitely is more centred around Voldemort Winning but *shrug*.

Summary: Five years after Voldemort won the war, the Order is still rebelling from the shadows. With most of his Death Eaters dead, the Dark Lord has found a new army in the Dementors of Azkaban. But how do you fight such a foul evil when there is no happiness left in the world?

A/N: Okay, probably shouldn't have left this as late as I did, lol. There was a whole massive plan, which I may one day write, but I lost interest in the fic and condensed it down to the important bit. Many, many thanks to the lovely Shadowofrazia for beta'ing, especially on such short notice. And to everyone on whichever Chatzy chat for all the sprints, you're all lovely and they're so helpful. Enjoy the fic, if you enjoyed it a comment would be great! :D

In Pursuit of Happiness

Harry is sure he's got away. He's taken every precaution. Masked his scent so his fear isn't radiating from him like a homing beacon. Taken every twisting alley and side street he can think of without getting lost himself. When he finally stops for breath outside a derelict warehouse in one of the old muggle districts, he's sure he's got away safely.

But then the cold catches in his throat, lodging there like icicles scraping against one another. And the frost dances its way up the wall at his back, the chill of it seeping through his coat and down his spine. And he knows, water crystals clinging to his dry lips and panting breaths like white clouds puffing into the night, he isn't safe.

His wand trembles in his shivering hands, useless as a common twig. The black shadow that falls over him blocks the twinkling starlight, absolute night. Deep in his throat, not quite reaching his mouth, he whispers a constant mantra: 'Expecto Patronum, Expecto Patronum, Expecto Patronum.' There's no possibility that it will work - no one has been able to cast a first level patronus in four years since the battle at Diagon Alley, the darkest day of the war - the day the Dark Lord broke through to the muggle world.

But Kingsley says hope never dies completely and that they should never abandon the spell while the Order still survives. It would be the same as kneeling at Voldemort's feet and presenting him with a white flag, waiting for him to decide their fates. The same as surrendering.

So Harry mutters the spell over and over through his chattering teeth, refusing to look away when ivory-boned fingers begin to extend toward him from the ragged folds of the Dementor's ebony robes. It inches steadily closer to his chest, where his heart is hammering frantically. His mother's screams are faint echoes starting to whistle on the edge of his hearing.

He pushes himself defensively against the crumbling brickwork as he can, a nanosecond further from the Dementor's touch. The screaming is gaining volume, morphing into agonising shrieks he will never be used to no matter how many times he finds himself facing a Dementor.

The edges of his vision blur and whiten as the cold emanating from its fingers pierce through his dirty coat and slowing his body, making his lungs heave with the effort. Consciousness slips away like snow blurring across his eyes, with the shrillness of his mother voice ringing in his head.

Harry is awoken by the creaking of old wood and the poke of straw on his back. The old barn is familiar enough to him that he knows where he is just by the scent of woody musk and the heavy thickness that comes with old hay bales stacked high to the ceiling. The sun is bright against his eyelids and he doesn't open them as he sits up, brushing a spider he can feel crawling lazily up his arm as he goes.

"What happened?" He croaks, knowing Draco can't be far away. As if on cue, the crackle of bacon sizzling in a frying pan starts up behind him, quickly followed by its heavenly smell.

"A Dementor cornered you," is the calm reply.

"No shit," Harry can't help but snap back. His nerves are frayed these days and his temper short. Malfoy, on the other hand, always seems calm, never irritated when Harry snaps at him needlessly.

Hermione was the first one to point it out – that Draco must have needed to learn patience to an extraordinary extent to do the job he does. To slither into the snake's pit and curl up beside fangs that drip poison close and pungent enough to taste, all the while disagreeing with every word uttered in the lair. All the while one small misstep away from death.

"You were lucky. Knot recalled the army moments before your soul was taken."

"You weren't my knight in shining armour then?" Harry teases back, voice purposefully soft in apology for his lost temper.

"Not this time, Potter," Draco huffs. 'This time.' They don't keep score anymore. When they were younger and still playing at being men at war - men who saw everything in black and white, and loathed each other for it - they used count their victories and tally their life debts.

Harry opens his eyes to see the late afternoon sun through half dilapidated roof. For a moment he yearns for birdsong and the buzz of bees about their business, but several years ago the birds flew south for the winter and never came back. Right about the time colour began to drain from the world. It makes everything feel pale and lifeless. Hopeless.

"How long was I out?"

"Less than a day; I found you early this morning." Draco doesn't say what he was doing – or more aptly where he was coming home from – and Harry doesn't ask. "I already left the Order a sign. They'll know you're safe by now," he continues on. Despite his calm, there's a tightness in his voice like he's annoyed but trained himself too well to let it out into the world.

"Thanks, don't know what I'd do without you," Harry jokes back, wincing at the twinge in his back when he tries to stand.

"You'd be dead."

There it is. An old argument they've had a million times since this thing started. Since Malfoy became his informant. Since they tentatively clasped hands one night in the pitch black on the muddy banks of the Thames. Since that first hasty end-of-the-world fuck the day before Death Eaters raged into Muggle Britain, which should have been the one and only, but instead became the first of many. Since that kiss that sealed their fates together on the cobblestones of this very barn.

"Yes, I should probably thank you for that," Harry says, chin held high and refusing to fidget as he turns to face Malfoy. Draco's hair is longer than the last time he'd seen him. It makes his face look gaunt and his cheeks hollow. But everyone has an emptiness about them now.

"You're an idiot," Draco sighs, flicking his wand at the steady flame heating the frying pan from beneath. The light catches on the silver of his fake hand at the movement. Harry's stomach tightens guiltily.

They still haven't made eye contact. It makes Harry want to squirm, but Draco is resolutely looking everywhere but at him. At first he thinks it's because he's done something irrevocably wrong, put his neck too close to the line once too many times. But then he notices the ever so slight bite of the lips and the brightness of his wandering eyes. Draco is angry because he's worried.

"Sorry," Harry manages to get out through the frog lodged in his throat. "But we both knew that before the world ended. It's genetic." Merlin, when did they become such saps? But that doesn't matter. Draco doesn't smile, because no one really smiles any more, but the relief is bone deep when his shoulders relax. Harry deems it safe to approach.

"Sorry," he murmurs again, when he's close enough that his breath rustles through Draco's hair and whispers into his ear like a caress. "Sorry I worried you."

"Again," the petulant child in Draco, the spoilt son in him that will never be completely lost, snipes over his shoulder.

"Again," Harry agrees soothingly. He brushes along Draco's back to turn him. Lets their lips hover breathlessly close, waiting for Draco to forgive him and make the move. Their mouths slide together with practised ease, something simple in their chaotic world. Harry is instantly gasping, heat bubbling up from the depths of his stomach, tingling through his limbs. His fingers prickle with static electricity where they grasp at the roughness of Draco's jaw and the shiver that runs up his spine is only partly because of the unnatural heat that brands the back of his neck where Draco's right hand rests heavily. Fleeting memories of before this, before the war, tangle with his senses. A time when he could have lead Draco to a bed and had his wicked way with him, no mention of literally taking a tumble in the hay inside a rotting stable.

He's plucking at the threadbare parting of Draco's robes when the bacon suddenly stops sizzling. Without the ambient noise of the old days – the birds and wildlife outside, the summer breeze stirring or the brook to the east babbling – the silence is deafening. They both notice it instantly, scrabble for their wands and slipping apart. Their defensive stance, back to back and alert, is textbook and well practised. Harry can see the bacon, frozen in a bubbly froth of oil and fat, out of the corner of his eye.

There is a Dementor gliding towards them at a chillingly luxurious pace from the main barn door, its robes billowing slowly.

"Quickly," Draco hisses at his back, the warmth of him reassuring and solid, "out the back." It isn't so much another door as a window that took a chunk of wall with it when it fell from its station. They run, tripping in their haste, for the opening, tumbling through together and thumping onto the hard soil below. The field that extends out in front of them is brown and dead, much like the woodland that is their goal, all gnarled branches and twisted bark. Everything lifeless. Except them.

Dementors are swarming from around both corners of the barn, herding towards them. Around their exposed flanks, swooping out wide to cut off their escape. Their forms are hazy thanks to Harry's own breath.

"Harry!" Draco's strangled gasp has him spinning so fast on his heel that he almost falls, scraping splinters into his hand where he catches himself on the exposed side of the barn. The Dementor inside the barn is upon them, its skeletal fingers reaching for Draco's pale cheeks.

The whistling screams pick up distantly in his mind, distracting. He scrunches his eyebrows against it, bites ferociously at the inside of his cheek to steady his focus.

"Expecto Patronum!" He yells, voice panting and panicked, uselessly. As expected, nothing happens. Nothing ever does. Black shadows are closing in at his back, the dead grass around them curling in the afterlife. And in front of him, framed by peeling wood, the Dementor's boned hand, the joints clicking quietly, presses against the delicate skin above Draco's pulse. Harry can see it leaping beneath the frozen touch. Draco's veins are a ghostly blue, climbing from the point of contact. The Dementor's towering height bends over its prey, folding over to take, take, take.

Anger stampedes through Harry's blood, boiling away the ice seizing his body. It's so pure and powerful that it overrides the shrieks and the fear, makes his hand rise, shivering from the intensity of his ire rather than the cold and the terror.

Makes his voice strong and loud and deep when he declares deliberately, "You cannot have him." Makes the stag that bursts from his wand that much more violent, that much more wilful, as it rampages to life before his eyes.

The Dementors squeal around them, panic deteriorating their ranks as they flee. The sound of their robes snapping the air as they take to the air sets Harry's teeth on edge. Draco is staring up at him from the ground, for once gob-smacked with his mouth slack. He slips his finger under Draco's chin to close it, as lost as his lover is.

The stag is watching them, head thrown back over its shoulder, when he turns to it. It paws at the ground once, a wild animal caged too long, before twitching its head – antlers proud and tall – and vanishing in a mist of ethereal, blue sparks.

"What the fuck was that!" Is the first thing Draco says once he's rediscovered the power of speech.

"No idea," Harry says absently, still staring out at the empty field, the shock of what he has just done settling against his clammy skin.

"Well," Draco blusters as he claws his way to his feet, "do you think you can do it again?"

Harry eyes him over his shoulder, watching the way his Adam's apple bobs with his anxiety and his hair sticks to the fresh sweat on his forehead. The silver of his right hand is stark against the dirty, darkness of his robes where it clutches at his heart - a reminder of all he has sacrificed for the Order: for Harry.

He laughs, low and raw in his throat. Actually laughs for the first time in five years. Draco stares at him like he's gone mad, eyes wide.

He just might have, but instead he admits, "You know what? Yeah, I think I just might."

And with just that one, magical change, the Dementors retreat from Voldemort's clutches like singed moths fleeing an open fire. Celebrations kindle over the country as word flies through the counties, word of the Dark Lord being pushed back, of victories for the Order that will turn the tide of this war, of hope rekindling and smiles flashing. The Order is rejuvenated and rising once more. There is a fresh, overwhelming belief that they can win again.

It lasts little more than a week. Then Lord Voldemort's new army of vampires descends upon London seeking blood and vengeance.