Chapter Fourteen of 'Reap the Hurricane'- Messages
Chapter Thirteen.
Title: Reap the Hurricane (14/19)
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 Fourteen-Messages
Draco tried to keep an eye on Potter and one on the white creatures in front of him as they walked over the crest of the small hill just in front of where the things had chosen to wait. The goat-creatures were still unknown factors; he and Potter had touched them last time only through the gloves and skins of wind that Potter had called up. Their tongues might be poisonous. Their bellows might deafen. They might have come to declare war on the camp. All unlikely occurrences, but Draco had known people to die from unlikeliness.
And then there was Potter, who sometimes walked in tune with Draco and sometimes out of it, who bobbed and darted his head forwards and ignored the way that their minds strained towards one another.
Draco sighed. Sometimes it was hard being the most sensible person in a camp full of Gryffindors.
“They signaled me from a clump of grass,” he told Potter as they came down the last slope and saw the gleam of white ahead. “The one that we saw, first-at least, it was the one we saw from the way it stuck out its tongue.” Now that Draco considered, he wasn’t aware of what had made him so sure that the creature they’d captured once had come back. It simply seemed the same, that was all.
And you less sensible than I thought you, than you were just praising yourself for being, Potter’s words whispered in his mind.
Draco scowled, and hurried on. “It showed me it had another one with it, and then it made all sorts of gestures twice. Stuck out its tongue twice, stamped its front hooves twice, blinked twice. The nearest interpretation I could put on the message was that it wanted to talk to two people, and that would be me and you.”
Potter nodded, his gaze fixed ahead, his legs moving in the same direction. Draco knew that he had gone into his mind in the way that Draco had seen him do earlier that day, when Draco told him about the werewolf spreading rumors. Focused on the task, the destination, no one and nothing else.
Draco brushed their arms together.
It worked. Potter shook his head, and came back to the world around him, instead of simply in front of him. He tilted his chin in Draco’s direction, acknowledging but not accepting or appreciating. It still stunned Draco that he could read those subtle nuances of emotion in Potter’s body language, but he knew their magic always chattered away beneath the surface, clarifying things that he wouldn’t know how to interpret otherwise.
“We’re together in this,” Draco murmured. “And if we’re going to be negotiators for the camp, if we’re going to show them that I am valuable for more than an occasional hunt, then we have to keep that in mind.”
“I always do,” Potter said, a faint, dark smile on his lips. “Being responsible for other people is the way I live.”
“But not for long,” Draco said, reaching out and trailing his fingers up and down the bones of Potter’s arm.
Potter ignored that, and kept walking. The two white creatures stepped out to face them, and Draco blinked. He had no idea how their extreme whiteness blended into the golden grass, but it worked somehow. Perhaps it helped that they had wild magic that aided them in running and leaping; why not hiding, too?
The second creature had large golden horns that swept back on either side of its face in neat curves, and large, liquid brown eyes. He edged closer to them, and Draco found himself looking hard for signs of intelligence in that goat-like face. Goats and sheep had never been part of his existence before this, except on his plate. It was hard to think of them as smart, however, when their stupidity and stubbornness was proverbial.
The brown-eyed creature looked at him for some time, then put out its tongue. Draco exchanged a glance with Potter, and felt their mutual decision in that moment. He reached out with his bare hand, no wind wrapping it, and met the creature’s delicate forks at the end of its tongue with his bare skin.
The creature shut its slotted eyes and bobbed its head, smearing Draco’s skin with its saliva. Draco shivered. Other than being cooler than normal, he really didn’t feel much about it that was different from the spit of other animals.
Not that he would have admitted it to his parents, but he had sneaked off with Crups and Kneazles when he was a boy and let them lick his hands and face.
Potter stepped forwards as the creature who had come to them the first time moved in, delicately prancing, tongue out. He extended his hand, and that one’s tongue licked up and down, in what seemed to be exactly the same movement as the brown-eyed one had used on Draco.
Draco started to roll his eyes. Yes, they were trying to communicate something, but he and Potter had no way to interpret that in any particular direction.
Then he froze as the saliva on his palm heated up, and two arcs of lightning sprang into being. Or rainbows made of lightning, that was what they actually looked like. One of them connected the two goats, and one of them connected him and Potter.
And along those arcs flowed a torrent of magic.
Draco could feel the grasses blowing past his body as he leaped. He could feel his legs curling under him, bearing him delicately up and down, his great heart beating in the front of his body at the same time. He could feel the others moving around him, swirling and schooling, avoiding attack from a flock of the enormous birds by simply being too many to strike.
He learned a name as he swooped through their bodies, united by the sound of their running hooves. Not the same thing as they called themselves, because what they called themselves was part of scent and ear-flicker and lift of tail and clash of horn and other things that he couldn’t imitate because he didn’t have those body parts. But what he heard was an adequate substitute, because his ears translated the hoof-drumming, and the hoof-drumming was a real sound. Mummidade.
Draco gasped and opened his eyes, only to find that the two goats-the two mummid-had pulled back from him and stared at him with bright eyes. He looked up at Potter, and Potter nodded, his brain absorbing the information from Draco and blurring it back until Draco was no longer sure which of them had had the first thought.
“No wonder we couldn’t understand them the first time they came,” Draco whispered. “They need at least two of them to communicate, and that one was alone.” He looked at the one that had come the first time, and the mummid nodded. The one with the golden horns draped its neck across the first one’s, and Draco got a sensation of a push on the forehead from them. He stepped back, wondering if they wanted him to go.
Potters squinted a little, and then laughed. “They discovered that we need names,” he said, “and sensations are the best way to communicate them. They’re trying to give us something to refer to them by.”
“To them,” Draco said. “Not just the first one we captured or the one with the golden horns.”
Potter shook his head. “Because, given a choice, they would never come here alone, and this is the name of the two of them as a unit. It would be different if there were three, or if there was a different pair, or if one of them had come with someone else.” He paused. “And I think what they want us to call them is Hornlock.”
Draco nodded, although his mind was still spinning, trying to make sense of an identity that was shared between two people and two people only, and would dissolve and split apart and enlarge if one of those people went elsewhere. Like a human family, except that a single human could be alone, and was a member of a limited number of families. The mummidade were not sentient alone, not truly, and their families were potentially in the hundreds, the thousands, or infinite numbers, when Draco thought of all the different combinations that one could get in a herd.
“Why did Hornlock choose to talk to us?” he asked Potter, because Potter seemed to make better sense of the thoughts that Hornlock sent in words at the moment.
Potter squinted at them again, and then his eyes widened. “Because we’re the only humans they’ve seen who are like them,” he whispered. “The only ones they’ve seen who are bonded by wild magic and don’t stand alone. They don’t-they don’t really understand that the others are sentient. They move around by themselves and don’t have connections to anyone else, and that makes them dumb animals, for the mummid.”
Draco couldn’t help but shift towards Potter as he said that. “They think of us as a mated pair?” he murmured.
Potter rolled his eyes at him. “If you’ll remember, the first time that Hornlock-half of Hornlock-came here, we hadn’t yet fucked. No. It’s not sex that makes the difference. I don’t think they form pairs based on sex, anyway, or not permanent ones. It’s magic. Magic is the channel that lets them communicate, and what lets them move together and escape predators. I suppose they might be able to see that the others use wands, but it’s a different kind of magic than the mummidade use, and a different kind than rides the winds on Hurricane.”
Draco leaned against Potter’s side, mimicking, for a moment, Hornlock’s posture by draping his neck over Potter’s. Hornlock danced, both bodies spinning apart, and then spinning back together to rear in front of each other, to touch their hooves and their horns together. They had much better balance on two legs than Draco would have expected, but on looking at them, he saw that that was probably magic, too, from the way their necks crossed and recrossed and the sly way they considered Draco out of the corners of their eyes.
He moved in front of Potter and extended his hands. Potter grimaced, as though he thought Draco was grimy, but held up his palms facing Draco’s. They could do nothing about mimicking Hornlock’s horns.
Hornlock bleated, and more magic came to Draco, bearing more messages. The taste of firm grass in the mouth and sweet water on the face-pleasure. The soaring feeling at the top of a leap, when the magic carried you and before you came back down and dodged to the right to escape a strike from a bird’s claw-exaltation, danger. Hornlock had come here as alone as they could, without the rest of the mummidade, though of course when they joined the herd again, they would become different people and would talk about it with their companions in different ways. They were being daring, and now Draco and Potter had understood them and justified their risk.
And then Hornlock turned and bounded off, bodies perfectly in time, arching apart from each other as though someone had set off a firework under them and made them leap like that. Draco turned around, keeping his palms on Potter’s. He wanted to honor the last communication Hornlock made with them. He wanted to touch Potter, to feel the magic that connected them still beating strong and steady between them.
He wanted to-do many things.
It was his aunt behind him, who stared at him and then averted her eyes. “They’re saying in camp that you’re going to leave us,” she told Harry. “And Teddy is crying for you.”
Potter shook his head and stepped back. “I’m not going to leave anyone,” he said.
Draco followed him and touched him palm-to-palm again. “Then that should include me,” he said.
Potter closed his eyes as if he was tired to death, and then stood there as if that would solve anything. Draco waited, ignoring the way that his aunt stared at him. He barely knew her anyway. Why should her approval or disapproval matter to him?
*
Harry would have liked to sit alone for a while, to settle the churning images in his head, and learn what he should do with them, and talk to Malfoy about what he intended to do, since that would influence how much Harry told the Weasleys.
Of course you’re going to tell them everything. You won’t hide things from your friends, will you?
But the moment was too crowded, and he knew that he wouldn’t be given the hours alone that would probably be necessary to explain. He focused on the one concrete need, the only thing he knew for certain was happening right then. Andromeda had said that Teddy was crying for him, and Harry was still Teddy’s godfather.
“I’m coming,” he said, and drew his hands apart from Malfoy’s, walking towards their house again. Andromeda scuttled in front of him, as though she thought Teddy would need the reassurance right before Harry showed up.
Malfoy moved like a shadow behind him, and came into the house with him, ignoring Andromeda’s pursed lips and elevated eyebrows. Harry saw that, and decided that he was too busy at the moment to care. He knelt and held out his arms to Teddy, who scrambled up into them and clung.
“Did you have a nightmare?” Harry asked him softly, settling back into a corner of the house and rocking with him. He could have gone to the rocking chair nearby, but Teddy acted as if he didn’t want Harry to move, digging his heels into the dirt and bending his legs. “What was it about?”
“I saw you,” Teddy whispered. “I saw you go.”
Harry grimaced and rubbed Teddy’s back. The wild magic that had affected Teddy’s eyes might be enough to bring him the stupider, wilder hopes and dreams that coursed through Harry’s head, he thought. Especially the ones Malfoy had influenced, making Harry think about leaving everyone else so they could roam Hurricane on their own.
With Teddy’s warm weight in his arms, and the way he shifted around on Harry’s hip to look up at him, those dreams seemed stupider than they ever had.
“I promise, I won’t leave you,” Harry whispered, his arms tightening. “I’ll sleep in the same bed with you tonight. How about that?” He ignored the way that Malfoy shifted behind him, too. Malfoy could go to hell if he thought he had to be jealous of the time Harry spent with his godson.
Teddy nodded. Already his eyes were falling shut again, and the clutch of his arms was a little looser. Harry kissed his forehead, stood up, and made his way over to Teddy’s shallow pallet. The easiest way would be for him to lie down on his side, with Teddy arranged next to him.
Malfoy came with him, slinking along like a lion. Andromeda, who had withdrawn to stand near the door, spoke up then. “Harry. Is he really going to spend the night here with us?”
“You can talk to him about leaving if you want,” Harry said. For once, he didn’t want to be the one who made all the hard decisions, who handled the task of speaking to Malfoy, when Andromeda was right there and could frankly do it herself. “But he’s your nephew, and I think you should get to know him.” He flopped down on his side and then lifted himself to get Teddy’s foot out from underneath his ribs. Teddy cooed and cuddled closer.
Malfoy knelt next to the pallet. Harry tried to ignore him and the humming bond in his chest as he closed his eyes. This was weird, yes, and creepy. He knew that was how the others would see it.
But it might also be something they just had to live with. Harry thought sleepily that that was the problem with the wild magic for everyone, they wanted it to play by the rules and respect their prejudices, and there was no sign that it would.
Malfoy’s hand slid down his shoulder and lingered in the middle of his back. Harry suspected that was part of the reason sleep was already overwhelming him. He gave a mental shrug. So he got some better sleep than he usually did. He had a hard time seeing that as a negative of this bond tying him to Malfoy. There were too many other negative things to get upset about, without looking for them.
*
Draco knelt there in silence, observing the way that Potter’s face became normal, in color and expression, as sleep touched him. Draco had thought he knew the way Potter looked by now, but he must carry more stress than Draco was aware of. There was no other reason for his face to change as much as that.
“I want you to leave.”
Draco glanced up and smiled at the woman who lingered by the door like a nervous Bellatrix. Of all the contradictions I thought I would never see, that has to be one of the most interesting. “Why, dear aunt?” he asked. “I’m related by blood to you and Teddy, and I’m Potter’s-companion.” None of the other words that he came up with seemed at all appropriate, although some of them would have been wonderful for annoying the piss out of Aunt Andromeda.
Andromeda gave a stern little rustle and smoothed her skirts down. “Because you lower the tone of this house,” she began.
Draco burst out laughing. The next instant, he muffled the sound to deep chuckles, not because of the color Andromeda’s face had turned but because he feared waking Potter and Teddy from their slumber. “Is that something anyone on Hurricane is concerned about?” he asked. “We left such manners and pure-blood social circles behind in the wizarding world.” Not to mention that there were too few of them to pay attention to things like cuts and snubs and ostracism, but if Andromeda hadn’t figured that out on her own, Draco saw no reason that he should help.
Andromeda sniffed. “If you paid more attention to people other than Harry-dear Harry. He has helped us a lot, but he doesn’t look enough at the expressions on their faces, the people who surround us.”
Draco sat back on his heels and regarded his aunt with more interest. It was true that her instincts, while useless for regulating social gatherings like the ones they were trained for, could help when it came to what the Weasleys were really feeling. They might say things to Andromeda that they would never say in front of Potter, and which Draco’s abilities were limited in letting him overhear. “I know that the werewolf doesn’t like me.”
“His name is Bill,” Andromeda said stiffly. “And he has reason not to like you. You scarred his face.”
“But didn’t turn him into a werewolf,” Draco said. “That never happened until he came to Hurricane, did it? And then it didn’t happen the first few days we were here, before I developed that wild magic and joined Harry. Strange that his control lapsed and he seemed to turn into a full lycanthrope exactly as I proved that I was worthy of trust.”
“If that is what you want to call it.” Andromeda folded her hands in front of her and gave him a long stare. “I see more of Bellatrix in you than I do of Narcissa, no matter how pale your hair is.”
Draco said nothing to that, precisely because he knew how much she wanted him to. “I still didn’t turn him into a werewolf,” he said. “If he wants to blame me for the scars, that I would have accepted blame for. But I’m not to blame for his craving for meat, or the fact that he tried to attack me even though he knew Potter was standing in the way. I’m not the one who made him look ridiculous. He did that, and Potter did.”
Andromeda laid her fingers along her lips. “You have no idea what pressure Harry is under,” she whispered, as if she had only now remembered that the man whose honor she was defending was in the same room. “You have no idea how much you hinder him with the Weasleys, when he should be concentrating on them.”
“He could have died under the bird’s claw, if not for me,” Draco said. “He might not have had the meat for his precious werewolf, if not for me. I’ve added to his survival, and to the Weasleys’. If they want to throw me out, then they’ll need to prove that they can survive without me.”
Andromeda’s chin went up, and trembled in a way that Draco knew. He had sometimes seen his mother use that particular expression in front of his father, though never when she actually felt what it seemed to imply. Andromeda might mean it differently, though. “I will talk to them about it,” she said, and walked out of the room.
Draco gave a dry chuckle, and lay down next to Potter. He listened to him breathe, and felt the tugging of the bond in his chest, the wild magic flowing back and forth between them. Trying to pull them closer, even though Draco knew they were as close as they could be at the moment without blending into one another at the level of skin and bone.
Draco half-closed his eyes. He didn’t understand it completely, that bond. He only knew it was his ticket to belonging in the camp, and that he and Potter had their share of secrets. The wild magic that had affected Teddy. The way they hunted together-or at least how they felt when they did it, because explaining that to someone else was not yet possible. The way that the mummidade had come to them, not anyone else.
Draco let his arm fall over Potter’s shoulder, his hand come to rest in the center of Potter’s chest, above Teddy’s hand and head. He shut his eyes, and breathed, and dreamed.
*
“I think we have to tell Hermione.”
Harry hadn’t wanted to talk to Malfoy about the mummidade this morning at all, actually. He had wanted to feed Teddy breakfast and coax him down to the pool to bathe-Teddy considered baths fun as long as there was no faucet in sight-and then take his turn on the heights around the camp. But when he had awakened, Malfoy was there, and nothing would do but to invite him for breakfast.
Malfoy had eaten his boiled grass, the strips of meat that Mr. Weasley had announced were safe as long as they were highly-cooked, and his water without comment. But he had risen when Harry had asked Teddy to go to the pool, and said he would come along.
And now they sat on the shore while Teddy splashed around and shouted, and Malfoy had asked what they were going to do with their knowledge.
“Have to?” Malfoy gave him a patient smile. “Who says that anyone else needs to know about it right now? Especially someone like Granger?”
Harry kept an eye on Teddy, but felt his shoulders tense up. He breathed out to loosen them and shook his head. “I’m not letting you do this to me, Malfoy,” he said calmly. “Andromeda saw. And we should tell Hermione because she’s someone the others will listen to, more neutral because she’s not a Weasley, and someone who’s acted as a leader with me.”
“They’re not going to accept me if you ignore the issue.”
Harry turned and stared at Malfoy, who had leaned in towards him. “You think I don’t know that?” Harry asked. “Why did I fight Bill for you, if not because I know that the Weasleys won’t just wake up and accept you one day?”
“I mean,” Malfoy said, his voice low and precise, “that trying to soften the news by having it come from Granger instead of me and you won’t work. They’re too used to being coddled. Pampered.”
“If you think the lives they had before we came here-”
“Not in that way.” Malfoy waved his hand as if he could wipe out all the Galleons his family had possessed. “I mean that they’re used to hearing all news from mouths they trust, and being told what to do, and when they have questions, someone soothes them. But there’s nothing that can make this soothing. The mummidade are sentient. The werewolf will be disappointed. We’re the only ones they’ll speak to. That will rankle, too. And the answers to their questions won’t make them much happier.”
Harry hesitated. Then he said, “I thought they might at least give it more consideration if-”
“We can tell them in turns, not all at once,” Malfoy said, peaceful but implacable. “These are the facts, Potter. It won’t matter what they consider. Hurricane will go on having wild magic. The mummidade will go on being impossible to hunt and not understanding people who try to confer with them one on one.” He reached out and leaned his hand on Harry’s knee, making Harry gasp and leap as his skin seemed to acquire a wind beneath the surface. “The bond between us will still be there.”
Harry swallowed. He wondered if Malfoy was giving him the best advice possible or if his longing to listen came from the bond.
But he had to admit that they were stuck in a position where the only communication possible had to come from them, and that no matter how soothing Hermione was, someone would come angrily to Harry and Malfoy and demand that they explain themselves. Probably Bill, or Molly. They might as well beard the dragon in its lair.
“Then let’s do it,” he said. “But diplomatically.”
Malfoy smiled at him. “We can but try,” he said, while his teeth bit the words off.
“Uncle Harry! Uncle Draco! Look what I can do!”
Harry turned to look and laugh at Teddy’s splashing spin-dance in the middle of the pool, conscious of the fact that Malfoy’s hand was still on his knee, and Malfoy showed no inclination to move it.
Chapter Fifteen.
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