Chapter Four of 'Reap the Hurricane'- Building the First
Chapter Three.
Title: Reap the Hurricane (4/19)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters; I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, other canon pairings
Warnings: Angst, violence, sex
Rating: R
Summary: After the war, a number of people who despair of fixing the wizarding world seek to emigrate to new, magical, but uninhabited worlds where they can live in peace. On the eve of his journey to a world called Hurricane, accompanied by his friends and godson, Harry discovers that Draco Malfoy’s name is also on the list of immigrants.
Author’s Notes: This is planned as a fairly short novel of 19 chapters, focusing on angst and drama. The title is, as is probably obvious, a variant of the saying, “Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.”
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Four-Building the First
Harry closed his eyes and turned to the right, pointing with both hands and then crossing them over. The clods of earth he was directing with the waves of air his wandless magic could lift should obey his directions-
“Ouch!”
Harry snapped his eyes open at once. Teddy had run into the building area, probably aiming to hug him, and the bottom of one of the huge dirt bricks had brushed his head. Now he stared up, rubbing the wound with his mouth open as though he didn’t understand what kept the cut earth afloat all by itself.
Harry made sure that he didn’t drop the blocks of earth as he hastened to Teddy. No sense in causing an accident and setting back their building schedule just because he was concerned about his godson. “No bump?” he asked gently, and lifted Teddy’s hair away from the back of his head, letting his fingers probe.
“Bump!” Teddy said, and giggled, but from what Harry could tell, he was only imitating the word, not getting upset. He held out his arms, and Harry swept him up and snuggled him on his hip. Teddy turned his hair black and shaggy and his eyes bright green in response, and leaned his head on Harry’s shoulder.
“Potter.”
Harry turned his head. The others had left him in charge of this section of the building, since his wandless magic would let him work alone more efficiently than with partners. And he was apparently in charge of dealing with Malfoy, too, given how all the others avoided him. Harry stifled a sigh-Malfoy was no more interruption than Teddy was-and nodded to him. “Teddy,” he said to the little boy currently staring at the bricks and trying to turn his hair the golden color of the grass, “this is your cousin, Draco Malfoy.”
*
Draco paused between one step and another, though he thought he recovered before anyone else could notice. Then he made sure to place his feet more delicately and more precisely as he walked towards Harry and his little cousin.
But-he hadn’t thought of introducing himself to Teddy when he came over. And he hadn’t thought Potter would think that was what he was doing, either. He had come to discuss the life-debts he owed Potter, and he assumed that Potter’s mind would naturally go to the same place. What else could they have in common?
It was true, though, that Draco wanted a family, wanted to get to know his only remaining relatives. It wasn’t his only reason for emigrating, but it was one of the greatest. He was the only Malfoy left, but not the only one with his blood left. And all his life, his parents had raised him to know the importance of blood, in many senses of the word.
He knelt down and held out his hand. He had already decided that Potter babied Teddy enough; he would greet him the same way he would an adult. “Hello, Teddy,” he said. “My name is Draco Malfoy. My mother is your grandmother’s sister.”
Teddy, placed on the ground near Potter’s feet, just stared at him doubtfully, one finger tucked in a corner of his mouth. Draco, who found that habit disgusting, nevertheless made sure his face was smooth and clear. They could discuss it later.
At last Teddy moved closer and said, “You know Grandma?”
Draco hesitated, then said, “I know about her. I don’t really know her.” He looked up at Potter, but he had his arms folded and his face so neutral that Draco bit his lip in response. He didn’t know whether he was doing well or poorly with Teddy. He thought Potter would intervene only if he actually hurt Teddy. Otherwise, he would let them get to know each other and hold himself aloof.
A squirm of emotion wormed through Draco at that. Isn’t that just like him? Holding himself back, always too good to get involved with a Malfoy?
But he was here for his cousin and not Potter, so he turned back when Teddy said, “Aunt Hermione. You know Aunt Hermione? Uncle Ron?” His hair changed color constantly as he talked, one minute brown and frizzy like Granger’s, the next moment red and limp like Weasel’s.
Draco was grateful for the neutral mask, now. He said, “I know them.”
Teddy giggled with delight, apparently reassured that someone wasn’t a stranger to people he knew, and then rushed forwards and grabbed Draco in a hug so sudden that Draco gasped at him before he reached out and hesitantly curled his arms around Teddy in return.
It was like holding a living bundle of short attention span. Teddy wriggled and leaped backwards, and said, “Go see water!”
Draco glanced at Potter. Potter said, “There’s a little stream coming down over there.” He gestured to the side of the nearest mountain-as Draco was learning to think of them, though in the wizarding world they would merely have been high hills. “I think Teddy wants to play in it, or see the fish we think are in it. It seems to be normal water, without danger.” He gave Draco a polite smile that did nothing to conceal the icy warning in his eyes, and turned away to gesture at the sod bricks he was raising. At once, they curved and danced, and Potter began to set them atop each other, framing a shallow hole that his winds had already scraped in the earth.
Draco continued to stare at his back, but Teddy tugged hard on his hand and said, “Go see water! Draco?” he added, as though afraid that Draco wouldn’t want to come along, or simply unsure of his name.
Draco faced him and smiled again. “That sounds like an excellent plan,” he said, and set off, though he quickly found that he had to adjust his pace to the small, bumbling strides of Teddy’s legs. Sometimes he jumped, sometimes he leaped, sometimes he stumbled against Draco, and sometimes he tottered in a way that suggested even the mostly flat ground of Hurricane would trip him up.
Well, of course he does. He’s two.
Draco thought about that, and about the fact that he would be part of Teddy’s life from now on, and he would never remember a time when he hadn’t known his older cousin.
There was an immense amount of satisfaction in the middle of his belly when he thought about that, spreading out, thicker and deeper than the dark blue pool that Teddy showed him proudly a few minutes later.
*
One of his winds connected Harry to Teddy and Malfoy, bringing back scraps of their conversation and Teddy’s lively chatter. As long as it stayed lively and without obvious distress, then Malfoy could be with him, Harry had decided. The minute that altered, the air would snatch Teddy away and bear him back.
And yet, Harry thought that most of his distrust of Malfoy came from old habit. Malfoy didn’t seem the type to try to hurt a child, and as Harry had told Hermione a few nights ago, before Angelina’s healing spells had taken hold and Malfoy had recovered from the fracture in his leg, Malfoy wasn’t stupid. He must know that Harry would keep him away from Teddy forever if he tried something.
So Harry kept most of his attention on the bricks that he needed to pile, and not much on Malfoy and Teddy. It was weirdly freeing.
He concentrated on raising the house that Hermione and Arthur, who had spent a lot of the last year studying various Muggle ways of building, had decided would be best. The dwellings had to be partially underground, in order to escape the force of the wind, and so far they had no wood or stone to build with, only earth. Magic was their greatest advantage, and of course the houses would have Sticking Charms and wards wound into them from the beginning, so that they wouldn’t be carried away by the storms or breached easily.
But that still didn’t mean that Harry knew the best way to put the squares of earth together the first time he built one.
He cocked his head to the side, trying to approach the problem from what was literally a new angle. If he looked at it like this, could he see where he should put windows? Or would windows be a stupid luxury, and instead they should just light the inside of the house with fire and Lumos?
If we can find anything to burn. Pure Incendio on the air itself would get tiring after a while.
Windows it was. Harry lifted his hand again, and the bricks of earth dipped and dived and swooped like hawks heading home to roost. For a moment, the air around him seemed to vibrate, and he could feel the magic pouring through him. He had opened the source of it, he thought vaguely, and while it came in answer to his call, it wouldn’t always do that, and he shouldn’t get used to it.
He would have to rest, just as Hermione said. Harry grimaced at the thought of that, but they were in a world where they had to conserve their resources now, and if he had to rest to be there for Teddy, then he would.
Faster and faster the bricks piled up, and then Harry’s magic whirled and dug, shaped whirlwinds, into the earth and grass of the plains, working loose more solid blocks of it. Harry had watched George and Ron working on it the past few days, and he knew how to do it now. He closed his eyes and poured more and more into the magic, knowing it meant that he would have to rest all the more quickly. But the more he did now, the less the others had to do later. They could work with bricks more easily than they could cut them.
A cry from behind him snapped his head around, but the winds continued digging. He ran towards Teddy and Malfoy, remorse curling and burning in his muscles. He never should have left them alone, he never-
But he slid to a halt on the bank of the fragile pool as he figured out what they were doing.
*
“I told you!” Teddy said, in the tones of someone who’d heard that phrase often, and held his hand up. Draco stared at the squirming silver thing in it, which had seven legs, evenly placed all around the body, and a single head. He shook his own head. It was ugly, and it was fascinating, and he couldn’t have caught it.
“How did you see it?” he asked, staring down into the stream again. There were darting shadows there, but they were all the blue and silver and grey of the dancing water itself, and he couldn’t imagine how Teddy had managed to tell which one of them was alive.
“I saw it,” Teddy said. His voice was dry; Draco mentally labeled that his “stupid adults” tone. He looked down and snatched another one. Draco wondered for a moment whether his cousin’s quickness was part of his werewolf heritage, and then decided carefully that he was never going to voice that question where Potter could hear it. “’Nother one!” Teddy said, and displayed the second thing. It was deep blue, but otherwise like the first.
A shadow flickered in the corner of Draco’s eye, rather than down in the water. He looked up with a smile, and found Potter standing on the far bank of the stream, staring at them, head bowed as if he was trying to figure out whether he should charge them now or later.
Draco stared back, then understood. Teddy had shrieked in delight when he caught the first thing; Potter must have mistaken it for a different kind of scream. He held his hands so Potter could make out the creatures Teddy had caught. “We were fishing,” he said, and found that his voice had descended to low and soothing. One didn’t challenge someone with magic like Potter’s.
Potter flicked his fringe out of his eyes and moved a cautious, crouching step forwards, until he was across the pool from Teddy, but not Draco. “You’re having fun, Teddy?” he asked. Draco scowled as he realized how careful Potter was to keep his focus on Teddy alone. As though I’m not worthy of his attention.
“Yes!” Teddy said, and bounced up and down, and then jumped straight into the water before Draco could stop him.
Potter snapped his hand out and made a hooking motion, and Teddy rose out of the water with a third thing in his hands, this one gasping and flailing in the air the way a fish would. Draco thought he could make out a delicate row of gills opening and closing down its rosy-gold sides, and also that he was going to murder Teddy the next time he got to be alone with him.
Another part of him, more occupied with magical theory, wondered if Potter even realized how easy it was for him to use wandless magic, and how he had turned to that before his wand, despite telling Draco that he used his wand for all the small charms.
“Don’t do that again,” Potter said, voice low and almost as soothing as the one Draco had used to him on the surface, but Teddy flushed and looked down, staring intently at the creature in his hand.
“Didn’t mean to,” he whispered. “Sorry, Harry.”
Potter doesn’t encourage him to call him by a title of respect? Draco wondered, and then answered his own question with a roll of his eyes. Of course not. This is Potter that we’re talking about.
“As long as you’re fine,” Potter said, and used the wind blowing from him to set Teddy back on the bank next to Draco. For a moment, his gaze passed over Draco and seemed to scrape him to the bone, as if Draco was one of the water creatures that he wanted to gut.
And then he nodded and turned around, walking away. Leaving Teddy to Draco’s care.
Teddy immediately began chattering and asking Draco what he should name his water-creatures, but Draco couldn’t pay attention as quickly. His eyes stayed fixed on the retreating figure of Potter, who, the gossips in the Ministry had told him, cared more about protecting his godson than anything in the world.
Which must mean, on some level, that he trusted Draco.
And that was worth more than a moment of attention, or even than some of the knowledge on Potter he’d managed to scrape up.
With a shake of his head, he turned back towards Teddy and the questions he was asking, questions that Draco could at least find the answers to even if he wasn’t particularly interested in the answers. This was all part of the process of getting to know his cousin.
*
“It’s a good first effort, I think,” Ron said, bending down so that he could look through the entrance of the house Harry had half-raised. He was sweating, and there were long streaks running down his arms and face that said he’d been doing it all day. Harry half-smiled at the ragged strip of red beard along his jaw. He thought Hermione would probably make Ron trim that off soon. “But we have to see how one stands up to the wind before we know if this is a good idea at all or a mad dream.”
“It’s a good idea to live underground,” said Angelina mildly, glancing up from beside the fire where George was supervising the cooking of some chicken. Both the chicken and the fuel for the fire had come from the wizarding world. Harry could see the way Hermione’s eyes watched both, and knew she had similar thoughts to his own running through her mind. A lot would depend on how soon they could plant, and what they could find on Hurricane, and whether it was safe to eat. “I don’t know how far the houses have to rise beyond that, though. It just seems like it would be an extra target for the wind to reach.”
“But wouldn’t it be depressing to live inside a house that was basically a cave all the time?” Ron demanded, dropping down beside her. “I want a high ceiling!”
“So do I,” Angelina said, absently slapping George’s hand away from a small bottle he’d been about to tip over the chicken, “but not at the price of having my roof blown away from over my head.”
Ron replied in the tones that told Harry they were going to have another of their mild rows, and Harry smiled and stepped away from the fire. Teddy had gone to sleep at the beginning of sunset, and Andromeda was watching over him. That left Harry to wander off into the plains, under that spectacular sky, and watch for signs of the next approaching storm, which it would be nice to have some way to predict.
The sunset never seemed to end, the same way the sky didn’t. The Unspeakables who’d investigated Hurricane said that the day didn’t seem to be as long as on Earth, but the dawn and the sunset lingered longer, and gave so much light that they hadn’t suffered any loss of working time. That was going to be important, Harry thought. All sorts of things he hadn’t thought about before were going to be important.
Right now, Hurricane’s sky had mostly turned a deeper shade of blue, with red and gold creeping along the edges like serpents around the edges of a tapestry Harry had seen hanging in the office of a Ministry official he’d had to bribe. He tilted his head back and further back, trying uselessly to see the whole expanse. Tilting it further, he halted on the middle of a small hillock from which he could still see the light of the fire. The last thing they needed was someone getting lost on those vast plains.
He had just sat down and lifted his head to try and catch the first of the appearing stars when something swept across them.
Harry leaped to his feet, mouth open to cry out that a storm was coming-and then stared. No cloud, he thought numbly, could move that fast, even on Hurricane.
They had wondered where the animals were, and mostly agreed with the first explorers that they were either rare, bounding, fleeting things that were difficult to get a glimpse of, or nonexistent due to the wild magic. But they hadn’t looked above. And they should have.
It made sense, after all, that in a world where wild magic spiraled through the storms, some things might have evolved to use those storms.
Flying above Harry was the most enormous bird he had ever seen, wings dappled black and glowing against the sunset behind it, though with pale patches towards the ends that told Harry the great flight feathers were probably white. He could see the folded-back, hooked feet, and the curved beak, and he swallowed. Of course it ate meat. A thing that big wouldn’t get by on grass-seed, even if grasses covered the planet from horizon to horizon.
The others had seen it now, and they were shouting. The bird craned its head down at the end of a neck that looked a mile long, and then it began to beat its wings. Harry didn’t know whether it intended to land or merely to gain some more height.
It didn’t matter. That wind would probably still put their fire out and scatter their careful hard work. Without thinking, Harry lifted his hands and spun a defense against it, tightly rotating blasts of air that formed a still dome several feet above his head. The beats of the bird’s wings met it and faded.
The bird immediately oriented on him. It could sense magic, Harry thought. Of course it could. That would be an advantage on Hurricane. He wondered for a moment if it could sense storms coming, and if there was a way that they could learn how to do it from the creature-
Then said creature hurtled down towards him.
Harry could feel his defense bending and creaking. He was good, but this bird stooping at him was simply bigger, and besides the wind he had to worry about the foot stabbing towards him, the hard knuckles of the talon opening and the gleaming claws on the ends of them, one of which could spear straight through half his body. He gathered up the power in him, not sure what he would do yet, only that he had to do something. He couldn’t let it kill him; he was Teddy’s protector, and one of the keys to their survival on Hurricane.
He had just begun to raise more wind when something hit from the side, something huge and formless, a swelling tide like the one that Harry had felt inside him more than once when he summoned his magic.
The bird screamed as the force struck one of the claws reaching for Harry and hacked it off, in a clean line that made Harry stare. The scream was what drove him to his knees, though, his head bowed and his arms tucked protectively around it. Above him, the bird swerved to the side, neck stretched down again. Harry smelled the carrion stench of its breathing, and then felt the downdraft as it leaped back to safety in the higher regions of the sky.
As soon as he could convince his shaky legs to bear him, he stood up and turned around, looking for his savior.
Malfoy stared back at him, standing near him with his hand still extended, fingers apparently gripped around the hilt of an invisible blade. He dropped his hand a moment later and swallowed, but Harry had noticed what he thought Malfoy would have wanted to keep secret. He had no wand in that hand.
Harry smiled at him, and his mind seemed to explode into random beautiful fireworks. He came to Malfoy immediately and took his wrist, wringing it until Malfoy reluctantly opened the fist with which he’d hacked off the claw.
“Thank you,” he told Malfoy, and if Malfoy didn’t believe him, then it wouldn’t be his fault. Harry was putting all the sincerity he could into his voice, all the sincerity he really felt. “You saved my life, and the debt you owed is paid, if it ever was owed.”
“You’ve saved my life three times,” Malfoy said, through white lips. The others were coming over, but cautiously, as though they assumed that the magic that saved Harry’s life might have come from something unexplained. “I only saved yours once.”
“But you have magic like mine,” Harry said, and laughed aloud. Malfoy started to jerk his hand back, but Harry gripped his arm and swung him in a circle, half-dancing. Malfoy gaped at him, and forgot to bristle. “Wandless magic. I don’t know everything you can do, yet, but you cut that bird’s claw off. And you didn’t have your wand. I saw you.”
Malfoy shook his head. “I wanted it to stop, and I imagined cutting the claw. And then I flung my hand out, and that happened.”
Harry nodded. “It’s probably the magic of Hurricane affecting you. It makes sense that huge storms of wild magic blowing back and forth would be bound to do something to the people caught in them. Not the Unspeakables, because they weren’t here long enough, and not me, because I already have it, but to other people.”
*
Draco wanted to tear his hand out of Potter’s again, but for a distinctly different reason this time. How dare Potter come up with that theory when Draco was just starting to explore it? And how dare he stand there smiling as the others came up, ensuring that his precious Weasleys heard it, too, and that it wasn’t Draco’s secret anymore?
It was never your secret in the first place, said the bitter, knowing voice he had used to talk to himself since his father’s imprisonment. You know it wasn’t.
Draco bit his lips and nodded. After all, once the wild magic began affecting other people, he never would have been able to keep it to himself, and he wouldn’t have been the only one affected.
He didn’t understand the smile that Potter had greeted the knowledge with, though, and decided that it was his best course at the moment to ignore the presence of Weasels and say so. “Why are you happy that I have the power to-chop things off?” It was the best way he could describe the ugly result of his desire and will and magic mixing and charging out of him before he was ready. If he had been able to choose any form of wild magic to possess, it wouldn’t have been that one.
“Because someone like you can be so useful,” Potter said, blinking at him. “You can help us do so much, and survive better.”
It never occurs to him that I could do anything else.
But why would it? They had left the institutions and the power struggles of the wizarding world far behind, and while anyone could travel through the portals, the number of journeys back was severely limited. Even if Draco found the portal again and attempted to return, there was no guarantee that he’d be able to.
Potter was right. Survival was the most important need here, and he could do it in a way that he never could in the wizarding world.
“You’re right,” he said, and moved closer to Potter, turning around to face the Weasels. More than half of them still looked at him with faint disgust, but Potter moved forwards to speak to them, and Draco had to admit that Granger and the remaining Weasel twin had the good sense to smile, at least.
The old resentment had cooled like lava, but through it, from beneath it, thrust something else.
I could belong here. I could make my place.
If I wanted to.
Chapter Five.
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