Chapter Thirteen of 'Wondrous Lands and Oceans'- Comes A-Calling
Chapter Twelve.
Title: Wondrous Lands and Oceans (13/about 20 to 30)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, George/Angelina, Bill/Fleur, others possible.
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, angst, bloody animal death, bonding.
Summary: The emigration to the wild magic world of Hurricane is complete, but not the settling-in process. Harry and Draco struggle to solidify both their own bond and their bonds with their family and allies-while setting out on journeys of exploration that prove there is more to Hurricane than storms.
Author’s Notes: This is a sequel to Reap the Hurricane; that one should be read first. This story will probably be somewhere between twenty and thirty chapters long.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirteen-Comes A-Calling
“We have to talk.”
Harry looked up and blinked. He had explained to Andromeda that he and Draco would probably be building their own house, and she had nodded and turned her back on him, bustling about to prepare tea. At least she had offered the tea to Draco as well, a better result than Harry had expected this early in the game, frankly. He had talked to Andromeda and then to Draco as they sat beside Teddy’s sheets waiting for him to go to sleep, while they kept their eyes and their words away from each other, but they didn’t hex each other, and silence was preferable to insults flying.
All in all, it had been a successful evening, and Harry and Draco had come out of Andromeda’s house to be greeted with the news that Ginny’s bird had eaten the bits of snake-shark and seemed likely to thrive. Harry had gone around unable to stop smiling. He’d sat on a small hill to watch the twilight come in, and Draco had joined him without complaint.
So why the serious tone now? Draco’s mind stirred with too many emotions to make out, and he reached out and put a hand on Harry’s shoulder instead of sending words down the bond. Harry took a deep breath and faced him.
“About what?” he asked.
“We have to talk about what you revealed,” Draco said. “I wish I could have heard it by myself, without Aunt Andromeda there.”
Harry shrugged, letting his arms fall open. If that was all this was about, then he had a simple answer. “I wish that could have happened, too,” he answered. “But it’s not the way it happened, sorry. I don’t think Andromeda would have trusted us as much if we’d shooed her away when I started speaking.”
“I didn’t mean,” Draco said, and stopped. A clear flash came from his mind, like sunlight reflecting from a mirror, that Harry was learning how to read. Frustration. But Draco continued a moment later, with more strength than Harry would have suspected from him. “I didn’t mean that we needed to talk about how she’d overheard it. I know you can’t do much about that. What I mean is that we need to talk about what you suffered.”
Harry swallowed and pushed himself away, standing up to stride back and forth with his arms swinging by his sides, although he didn’t leave the top of the hill. He remembered an old, odd fact Hermione had told him, that walking was always good for you and you shouldn’t sit too often. He was getting exercise. “But I talked about it,” he said over his shoulder to Draco. “I lived through it, and it’s done.”
“You’re not that stupid,” Draco said. “Stop pretending that you think I am.”
Harry turned around with his arms pinned across his chest, feeling as though he was pressing up against the edge of a cliff with only the wind to defend him. “Fine,” he said. “But I honestly don’t know what you think you can do. Make me stop being broken? Go back through the gate to Earth and punish the Dursleys? There’s nothing left. I told you what happened to me, and we have to live with that, just the way that Andromeda has to live with her grief.”
“Come here,” Draco said, and snared his ankle as Harry strode past him again. Harry tumbled to the grass, and Draco heaved himself on top of Harry, lying chest-to-chest, staring at him so closely that Harry had to struggle to focus on his face past the blur of his nose. “You’re not broken,” Draco said, into his face.
“Someone who doesn’t trust anybody new and doesn’t want anybody new to care for is,” Harry said, and he was glad that he had the fight and the fire back, that he was fighting Draco the way he had when the bond first started, instead of lying still and paralyzed by pain. “I might not even be able to love a child we had. That’s pretty fucking broken, don’t you agree?”
“You would manage to persuade yourself to care for any child of mine, of yours, the same way I showed I can care for Teddy,” Draco said, and dismissed the notion with an airy wave of his hand that irritated Harry more than anything had done so far. He tried to buck and remove Draco from his hips that way, but Draco settled comfortably into place, and Harry’s body reacted in the predictable way. Draco paused, then chuckled. “You want to?” His emotions were bright and clear again, butter-yellow of sunshine mingled with a pale light that he usually showed more when he was angry.
“I don’t know,” Harry said, and shot a hand into Draco’s hair, tugging hard, to see what he would do.
What he did was reach down and clench his hand around Harry’s in warning, squeezing it for a minute so that Harry would know what he felt, and then bend his head and kiss hard enough to split Harry’s lip. Harry closed his eyes and went with it, his head falling back, letting Draco’s hands on his hips and sides squeeze and tease him away from what they’d been talking about.
Except that it turned out Draco intended to carry the conversation into their fucking-and he didn’t even have to talk aloud to do it.
You’re not broken, he murmured and purred down the bond as he conjured a shield over them that would keep most people from coming too close and curious eyes from seeing in. Or do you think I’m broken because I admitted to being a coward?
That’s different, you-
You always feel that it’s different. Draco was dragging his clothes off, with the maximum of contact, so that Harry felt the scrape of nails and the touch of skin along with the pull of fabric. Then he did the same with his own clothes, giving Harry all the sensations through the bond so it really was impossible to hide from them. Because it’s not you, and you think you know best, and you’re just so unique that no one else can stand it. He was naked, he had both of them naked, before Harry could concentrate, and he leaned down and let his teeth rest against Harry’s chin without actually biting, just so that Harry had a hard time forgetting they were there. Then he reached into the pocket of his discarded trousers for the lube. You’re not different. That’s the real arrogance in what you feel, the sin that you need to be forgiven for but don’t think about. You separate yourself from everyone else. You think that no one else can feel what you feel, that other people can’t face the scars and decide that they might be broken, too. Poor you.
I never denied anyone else the right to feel that way, Harry argued, as he spread his legs. You can call yourself broken. I don’t care.
Draco laughed at him as his fingers slid inside, and Harry closed his eyes in a way that he knew would intensify the feelings instead of allow him to flee from them. But maybe he didn’t want to flee, not right now. Except you would argue that I wasn’t, really, and how dare I call myself that? And then you would list all the things I had to be proud of. He let his teeth rest on Harry’s shoulder this time as he slid inside. I think I might as well grace you with a touch of your own medicine.
Harry, twisting urgently on the grass, and feeling strands of it tease and prickle his skin, and feeling Draco twist inside him in response, had no idea what he meant at first. But then Draco began to whisper, in a way that meant he would never get out of breath or have to slow down, even as he rocked into Harry and gasped in unison with him.
You’re more intelligent than you give yourself credit for. Most people wouldn’t have managed to stay alive long enough to defeat the Dark Lord, especially not when they’d been raised totally outside our world. Our old world. Draco paused, fingers flexing into Harry’s arms, and Harry opened his eyes to look at him. Then he had to turn his head away.
Draco laughed, but didn’t try to make him look, because he could still be inside Harry’s head, mind to mind, whispering, a weight against him, warmth and light there, and there was nothing Harry could do to shut him out. And raised by abusive Muggles. You claim that you’re broken because you can’t trust the people who turned on you? I call it a miracle that you trust anyone at all.
Harry flailed and raised his legs, locking them around Draco’s waist, hoping to distract him from his little list. Of course, the way they were linked meant Draco knew the reason he was doing that, and laughed again, thrusting forwards until Harry was driven into the grass and his back hurt.
You’re determined. You can pull off the leadership role when it’s not what you wanted. You’ll make bad bargains, like the one you made today with me and Andromeda, because you know it’s necessary. You put others before yourself. You love consistently and deeply, and even if something has to force you to admit new people into your circle, you’re fiercely loyal to them once you have them there.
Harry shuddered and groaned. He didn’t like hearing himself complimented. He never had. He had turned away in embarrassment from the articles about him that came out in the newspapers, even the ones that were pure praise with no blame mingled in them.
But Draco’s compliments were raising his cock, and his body warmed and his voice keened out of his throat as he listened to them.
You’re aroused, Draco said, marking every word with another pump of his hips, jagged and rhythmless, that hurt Harry and made him want more. You like people to love you. You want it.
Harry groaned a protest, this time, but Draco overrode him with a laugh and a swipe to his erection that almost made Harry come right there. Your body doesn’t lie. You can’t do anything but go along with me and listen to the way that I talk because you fucking love it. You would like to fuck yourself if you could, wouldn’t you? Do it looking in a mirror. Draco slowed, rocking in place, staring into Harry’s eyes all the while. You can’t. I’m in you, and I don’t plan to move aside for anybody.
It could have been anything, from the color of the emotions that were boiling in Harry’s mind right now to the fact that Draco was in him and wanted to be there, but something threw Harry over the edge. He shuddered and clung to Draco, needing the support as the air around him changed colors and the pleasure tore him apart.
Draco followed right after, and draped himself over Harry with a soft laugh. “You fucking loved that,” he repeated aloud. “You love the way I ride you. And you love compliments.” He slapped Harry’s shoulder. “That makes you unbroken in my book. Nothing will do for you but to be loved and respected and wanted like a normal person. That’s what I need, too.”
Harry curled himself around Draco. He didn’t think he was up to speaking aloud, so he simply swept everything he felt now down the bond, and had the satisfaction of seeing Draco’s eyes spark bright before he closed them.
“I know, Harry,” Draco whispered drowsily. “I know.”
*
Draco woke in the morning thinking about how bloody graceful it was to be alive.
He could live here, he thought, as he lay looking drowsily at the too-blue sky of Hurricane, the way it darkened around the edges, the way that the colors slid and blended into one another. Less rose here, but more shades of blue.
He could live in a place where people appreciated him, and there was someone who would fight for him. Maybe Harry hadn’t defended him from Andromeda as often as Draco thought he should, but he had done it, finally. And there was Teddy, and the bond with the wild magic, and the power that shredded through him whenever he felt the wind blow. There were the mummidade and their ritual by the ocean. There was the knowledge that Harry was darker in some ways than he was, that he would do things Draco would never do. Obscurely comforting, that one. He had tortured, indeed, but he hadn’t taken the intense joy in it that Harry seemed to.
He rolled back over and looked at Harry, who was still asleep, smiling as he did so.
He could make the Chosen One believe him, and accept him into his body. That was still a source of wonder to Draco.
He reached out a finger to trace the corner of Harry’s mouth, and then became aware of someone watching him. He rolled back over, not lazy now. There were claws on his fingers and steel in his spine.
Two of the mummidade trotted towards him, their horns interlocked in a way that made them seem to skim over the grass like birds with joined wings. They were a different pair than the ones Draco had met before with Harry, Hornlock or Grassgifted or any of the others. But there were two of them, and that meant they could speak.
They halted in front of Draco and stared at him intently again, and Draco sighed as he remembered and reached out to shake Harry. They could only speak to people bonded by the wild magic, which meant he and Harry had to be awake and sharing their minds to hear them.
Harry came awake more slowly than usual, and the first thing he looked at, instead of the two mummid or the winds, was Draco. Draco let his hand rest on Harry’s face, regretted that they could not enjoy the moment for long, and pushed more emotions down the bond, in colors of peach and cream and gold, before turning to face the mummid.
What do you want of us? he asked, with Harry’s words chiming along with his, and the way the mummid went still said they had heard.
The mummid sent back one flickering image, of sunlight in water, so quick and so quickly obscured that Draco was almost sure he had not seen it. But Harry grunted and said down the bond, Sunglint, so Draco reckoned that he could give them credit for a name, at least.
Then the mummid’s images began moving faster and faster, and if Draco hadn’t practiced so much at silent communication with Harry over the last few days, he doubted he would have caught them all. Blood-stained white fur. The leaping, driving force of the wind, carrying mummid off-course and into birds’ claws. Birds swarming above them, wings flapping so hard that the grasses bent under them and the mummid were prevented from leaping simply by that, and the sound of the birds’ shrieks came sharp and hungry enough to make Draco cringe.
“They’ve come,” Harry whispered, not understanding as quickly as Draco did but putting words around the thought more quickly, as usual. “The birds. They’ve broken their usual migration and come back out of season.” He rolled over and stared at Draco. “Do you think that someone stirred them up? Or was killing the bird the way we did, and taking one to tame, something that upset the natural balance?”
“I would prefer not to blame ourselves until we have all the available evidence,” Draco said coolly, and turned to face Sunglint again. “So. You want us to come and fulfill the promise of our alliance by helping you?”
Once again, images pelted and poured past him, but now one of them was Harry and Draco explaining the presence of a bird in the camp to the mummid who had come to question them. Draco nodded. Sunglint trusted them to have solved one problem in the past. They trusted them to solve this one now.
“Come on,” he said, standing up and holding out a hand to Harry. “We have a job to do.”
*
Harry tilted his head back and closed his eyes. It was easier to imagine the course the birds had flown in his mind that way, and he could feel Sunglint shifting alongside them, pouring new images in whenever he or Draco paused.
Yes, the birds had flown there, from above that small hill in the distance and over the curves of golden grass that stretched before and behind them. They had gathered in a flock suddenly, as though called together by some larger force. Harry shuddered a little. He didn’t want to imagine a force powerful enough to compel the birds of Hurricane.
Then don’t imagine it.
Harry flashed back annoyance at Draco, and kept his eyes firmly closed. They were going to do this, and imagining the course the birds had flown was the first step. Then they might know where they had come from, and where they had gone.
Draco was with him as he worked, stirring up the winds and setting them to observation. Draco was the one who handled Sunglint’s anxiety and sent back a reassuring wave of protectiveness, the idea that they were doing something. Harry didn’t know for sure if he could make the winds tell him about something that had occurred in the past instead of happening right now. It wasn’t like the winds were sentient, or that they had a sense of time.
But he was trying, and while he tried, Draco would be right there next to him, making sure he had a fighting chance.
Perhaps it was because he wasn’t thinking obsessively about it, but the winds whispered up and over and through him, and then came down in his mind with a sharp image. Harry opened his eyes, gasping. The image was seen from above, and to the side, and it took a moment for him to make sense of it and reduce it to human perspectives.
“You saw it?” Draco’s voice was soft and tense. Working with Sunglint, alone, must be taking up more effort than Harry realized when he didn’t have to be a conscious part of the bond.
“Yes,” Harry said, and turned his head. He realized that he was looking over the plains in a more northerly direction, neither the eastern path they had taken towards the sea nor the western one they had followed when Primrose’s people were killed and they went to avenge their deaths. “They came from that way. And something-something was driving them. Not bringing them, not tempting them. Driving them.” He shivered.
For a moment, Draco stood very still, while Sunglint flashed their name-image over and over again. Harry thought it served the same purpose as soothing muttering would for a human. Then Draco inclined his head and said, “You’re sure?”
Harry nodded. He could still feel the force the winds had felt, the dark rising thing that was like a storm but more sentient. The winds had whirled and fled before it. Harry doubted that it could hurt the winds, which after all had no more stable identity than the mummid did and which he and Draco cut all the time, but it had still changed the sky.
“Made it go still,” he said aloud. “That’s what it did.”
Draco tensed beside him. Harry knew he was thinking of the ritual they had witnessed and how all the winds in the area by the ocean had spiraled into the middle of that dance.
“Was it something like that, then?” Draco asked, when the breathless moment had passed by. “Another creation ritual? Because the mummidade can use it is no reason to think that other species can’t, too.”
“We know the birds reproduce by eggs,” Harry said, shaking his head. “I don’t think it had anything to do with them. The birds were-tools. The same way the wild magic is a tool to me and you.”
Draco nodded. “Then we have another enemy,” he said, and Harry realized that his cheeks were flushed and his eyes alight. “Something else that we can fight and destroy with no worries about whether it will provide meat for the camp, or whether it’s human and it’s immoral to torture it.”
Harry stared at him. “You were the one who pointed out that it was immoral of me to torture Rasatis,” he said at last.
“Yes, but I would prefer not to have to deal with the complication,” Draco said smoothly, looking at the northern horizon as if it was Harry after a good fuck. “This way, we can be sure that we won’t have to. It can’t be anyone human who’s controlling the birds.”
Harry sighed, but he had to agree. Even assuming that another human had bonded to Hurricane’s wild magic more strongly than he had, or that one of the Unspeakables had remained behind when they explored the world and so knew more about it than anyone else, the winds’ memory of it didn’t feel human. The winds knew and understood wizards now, thanks to the existence of Draco and Harry, just as they understood the existence of the mummidade. Harry thought he could probably identify the birds and the snake-sharks and any humans who lived in other communities and used the wild magic, too. But this was different.
Bodiless, said Sunglint suddenly, or seemed to say, picturing the wind ruffling white fur and the way that the wind danced away again, and how horns would strike it and come to rest on nothing.
“Bodiless,” Draco echoed blankly. “Is that their name for a particular enemy?”
“According to our alliance, their enemies are our enemies,” Harry said. He stretched, and tried to work out the kinks in his arms that seemed to have taken up residence there from a night of sleeping on the ground-and other activities on the ground. He tried to ignore Draco’s smirk. “We should tell the others.”
“And go away on our own again?” Draco asked softly, catching his wrist as Harry started to turn back towards the camp. “The others won’t like it, not so soon after we spent so much time by the sea on our own.”
Harry hesitated. That was true. And it might also be true that they should investigate discreetly, not go charging off to the north and warn whatever waited there.
You’re learning to be sensible, Draco murmured. I’m impressed.
Harry ignored him and focused on Sunglint again. He tried to come up with images of the mummid standing at their side as they walked north, and hoped that he had managed when he oriented on the same small hill and sweeps of grassy plains they had shown him.
The mummid passed some time in staring at him. Then they dipped their horns and trotted further into the camp.
And sometimes, a sensible genius, Draco said.
Harry smiled at him, and they went to their council of war.
Chapter Fourteen.
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