Chapter Twenty-Eight of 'Wondrous Lands and Oceans'- Negotiating
Chapter Twenty-Seven.
Title: Wondrous Lands and Oceans (28/about 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 Twenty-Eight-Negotiating
“At least let us come with you, mate.”
Weasley’s voice was sharp-edged, and Draco wondered if he and Granger-fetched by a quick wind speaking in Harry’s voice from the camp-had forgotten that more people than their “mate” were standing here. Westshadow stamped and stomped behind them, regular rhythms that made Draco’s jaw ache. He didn’t even need an image or contact from the mummidade to translate that. They were getting impatient, and saw no reason why they, Harry, and Draco shouldn’t just leave.
But, of course, Weasley and Granger had to debate.
“You’re not bonded to anything,” Harry said, and Draco touched the middle of his back, because his voice had the same sharp edge as Weasley’s, and Draco admired him for that. “Draco and I are. The mummidade are bonded to each other. We’re protected against what Bodiless might do to our minds, as long as we concentrate on the bonds. Can you promise that you can help us if you come? Or are you just going to succumb, the way Hermione started to?”
Weasley and Granger exchanged a long glance. Then Granger said, “I thought you were going to try and negotiate with the riders, not destroy Bodiless.”
“But we’ll be vulnerable to Bodiless while we’re there,” Draco cut in, because no one was saying the obvious and he would do it if he had to. “That’s true no matter what we accomplish.” For a moment, he wished he was bonded to Weasley and Granger, too, because that way they would at least have to listen to him.
Then he shuddered at the images that appeared in his head of Weasley and Granger having sex and he and Harry having to listen in. Or maybe the bond would even force them all to sleep together. Harry thought they were more strongly bonded because of their desire for each other, and that the bond had in part created that desire.
Yes, let’s not wish for things to be different than they are, Harry said in the back of his mind. Or the wild magic might hear you and make it so.
That wasn’t to be borne, so Draco pasted a smile on his lips and looked as appealingly as he could at Weasley and Granger. “Can’t you think of it like the ways that the mummidade combine?” he asked. “We need different combinations to face different dangers. Sometimes it’s just me and Harry. Sometimes it’s the four of us. Sometimes it’s the two of us plus the mummidade. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that you let us go by ourselves.”
Weasley and Granger did their best to imitate his and Harry’s silent communication, but failed. But at least they came to some kind of consensus. Granger turned away and sighed, and Weasley said, “All right. But you’d better bring him back safely, Malfoy.” He raised a fist at Draco, who thought of the ways he could cut Weasley apart with his invisible weapons, and smiled.
Can you not get along with him for three seconds? Harry snapped in Draco’s direction, and reached out to clasp his friends’ hands. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I promise, we’ll fight beside each other.”
Westshadow snapped all its hooves down at once and crowded forwards, staring at them. If it understood, Draco thought, that was probably a silent promise to protect them as well, but right now, it was all impatience to be gone, and it turned its heads and looked at the silver oval in the corner of the valley.
“Are you sure that you should be going into one of those, Harry?” Granger was apparently the master of the last-minute fear, and she pressed her hand to her mouth as she looked between them and the oval. “You saw what the one we found near the ruins did to that stone…”
“And this one did the same thing with the grass,” Harry told her. “But the mummidade gave us memories of surviving it, and as far as we know, they don’t know how to lie.”
“But they could be mistaken,” Granger said, and stepped forwards as if they would have to fight the argument all over again. “Or they could be able to survive it, and they don’t know that you can’t, because no human has ever gone through one before.”
Harry opened his mouth, and Draco knew from the darkness flooding the bond that he would probably give in and keep discussing it with his friends until Bodiless managed to reach down from the north and claim them all.
“Oh, honestly,” Draco snapped, and stuck his foot in the silver oval.
It felt like silence engulfing him. For a moment there was a hesitation, as if the magic in the oval wondered what it was touching, and then Draco felt the same sensation that he did when he hung motionless in the middle of the air on Harry’s wind. Then he was sinking, gentle, slow, but without pain.
“If this is the way I’m going to die, at least no one’s going to be chattering at me while I do it,” he told them, and then leaned back and stretched his arms out the way he would when floating in the sea.
Draco. And you scold me for being reckless, Harry’s voice snapped in his ears as he jumped into the water. Draco felt Harry shoving at him, less with hands than with magic, and then they were side-by-side, and Harry was calling farewell to Weasley and Granger with his voice while saying something quite different to Draco. You idiot, what was I supposed to do when you were sinking out of sight?
Is that what it looked like? Did the same thing happen to my body as it did with the stone and the grass? Draco didn’t intend to speak aloud; whatever surrounded them was gentle, and they seemed to be breathing easily enough, but he still didn’t want it in his mouth. He looked up and down, and saw nothing but silver. Still, they were moving; the downwards pull continued. Is Westshadow following us?
Yes, your body bent just like that, Harry said. Almost gave me a heart attack. His hand brushed Draco’s as he turned himself over on his back to look above them, and Draco knew it meant things that would have been difficult for even them to talk about. I think I can see Westshadow above us. You look.
Draco snorted as he obediently gazed above them, turning his head back and forth and now and then opening and closing his eyes when all that still, soft silver was too much for him at first. As if you do all the work all the time.
Shut up and look, you. Harry was smiling into his head.
Draco squinted some more, and then nodded, because there was a series of white specks moving after them, and while almost anything might live in the silver ovals, Draco noticed that these specks all kept together in a four-formation. That was too much of a coincidence. Yes, I can see him coming. Or them. Whatever you should call a quartet of mummidade who think of themselves as one being.
Not think of themselves. Are. Harry leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Draco did have to admit the sensation was nice, like warm water flowing past you. I wonder if the riders and the beasts think of themselves the same way, however they bond. Are they two who work together, or a pair who are one?
It might be different for them. I got the sense that it was the riders who were intelligent, and directing the beasts. The beasts never struck me as anything more than animals.
But one of them came alone to watch our camp.
Acting on orders.
Pretty smart if they can understand orders that well and remember them when they were so far away. Smarter than dogs, anyway.
So they wrangled as they sank through the silver, and their arguments were friendly, and Draco knew Harry had forgiven him for the leap-if he had anything to forgive him for-and Draco forgave him for listening too much to his friends and prolonging an argument that had grown perfectly ridiculous already.
Harry snorted. Draco could feel the pressure of all the things that he wouldn’t say, all the things he could have said.
But he didn’t say them, and that was part of what made their float through the silver oval to the other side, the other “shore,” maybe, all right.
*
The silverness around them reversed itself while Harry was talking to Draco about whether bonding with a beast who wouldn’t question or disobey you was better or worse than bonding with another human. One moment they were drifting down, and the next, they were drifting up.
Harry stretched his arms out in front of him and moved so that he was shielding Draco from whatever might wait above the surface of the water. Draco spluttered and spat at him, but Harry shook his head. He didn’t think they were suddenly less able to breathe the silver; it was just thicker here, and they were thinking of it more like water.
Then the surface broke through them, or they broke through it, and Harry found himself on a shore of rocks before he thought about it. As if it spat us out, he told Draco while they both rolled out of the way so that the mummidade would have room to scramble out of the pond when they got here.
Draco snorted, but said nothing. He was staring around, and Harry stood up and did the same.
He had assumed, without thinking about it, that this particular oval would bring them straight to the green meadow they had reached before. But that was impossible, when he thought about it, because the mummidade hadn’t known about the riders, and surely they would have if they’d had a doorway that once led straight into the heart of the riders’ home territory.
No, instead they stood on what looked like the northern slope of a huge mountain, black and shiny like obsidian. Harry bent down and picked up one stone, turning it around in his hand. Then he winced and dropped it. Like obsidian, it had small, sharp points that were almost impossible to see, and it had cut his palm.
Draco flicked a sardonic glance at him, but said nothing, instead turning to the mountain in front of him and studying it. “I don’t recognize this at all,” he said at last, maybe to hear his own voice in the lull of the wind. “Do you?”
Harry shook his head, and at that moment, Westshadow arrived, as the clatter of hooves behind them announced. Harry turned around and touched Draco’s hand, so they could project an image of clustered paths leading in many directions. Which way from here?
Westshadow tilted its heads back and forth, one to each major compass point, then back to the points in between. Then it leaped forwards, and the four bodies trotted towards the direction Harry had tentatively identified as the west.
Of course, Draco said, and fell in behind them.
Harry followed him with a faint smile, although he kept a net of winds circling above his head, ready to snatch them into the air at the first sign of danger. So far, it seemed that Westshadow was living up to its name.
Their name. His name. Whatever you call a mummidade.
I think it should be their name, Draco said. Because we see them as made up of multiple beings, whatever they really think of themselves, and our perception is the one that matters.
If we negotiate successfully with the riders, you’ll have to give up all that human-centricity, Harry said, and made sure that Westshadow was climbing a slope that rose gently in front of them, without any place that would be too hard for Draco’s feet.
You take such care for my comfort.
Harry shot a tentative glance at Draco, to tell, if he could, whether Draco was sarcastic or not. But from the dancing white and pink that came down the bond, Draco didn’t know himself. He caught Harry’s eye and shook his head a little.
“It’s nice of you to be concerned for me,” he said. “But it still surprises me, when I think about it. I got so used to standing alone that last year before we left the wizarding world.”
“Care to tell me about it?” Harry asked, extending a hand to Draco so that they could clamber over a boulder Westshadow’s bodies had simply leaped over.
Draco accepted his help, but his fingers were sinking into the warm skin of Harry’s wrist, pressing a message into the tendon that Harry didn’t understand until he heard the words. “I don’t know. Do you care to tell me about your childhood, and what made you so ready to take up the role of a hero even before you heard that a prophecy had designated you for that?”
Harry winced, and might have dropped Draco’s hand, but Draco simply shifted his balance and dug into the hold. Harry turned his glance ahead and kept grimly climbing, in silence. It would be easier to climb with two of them.
Harry. You have to talk about it sometime.
I didn’t offer to let you talk about the loneliness you were experiencing because I wanted to use that as ammunition against you, Harry snapped back.
Draco was silent, in both the bond and his voice, for a little while longer. The black slope was starting to level out ahead of them, and Harry thought he might recognize this place after all. The crest of the mountain was rising in a distinctive saddle that he had glimpsed in the far east from the riders’ valley.
You think that’s what I would do? Draco whispered. Use whatever you tell me as a weapon against you?
Not-really, Harry said. But you would think that it explains everything about me. Like you just said, that I was primed to be a hero because of my shitty childhood or something. I want to tell you things about me, but not if you’re going to think you have to analyze me because of them. And let me remind you that there’s a gate between you and the Dursleys now, anyway, he added, cheering up a little as he remembered that. If Teddy and Andromeda can’t go back through the gate because of their wild magic, then you definitely can’t.
They did something I would want to punish them for, then? More than you’ve told me so far.
Harry shook his head. Should we really be concentrating on this right now? We might be facing the riders any second, or Bodiless.
We’ll always be facing some enemy. We haven’t had a quiet moment since we got back to the camp from our journey to the north. Yes, I want to know, if you’ll tell me.
That, Harry discovered, was where the wordless nature of the bond was an advantage. He could feel Draco’s sincerity, gold-veined white, and he could give memories back, if he wanted, memories of small dark places and hunger and shame and accidental magic and bewilderment and imprisonment, without having to explain everything. There were words echoing in there, ones like “Freak” and “Filthy,” but Draco would hear them as part of the whole, not in Harry’s voice.
Aunt Petunia’s voice, if anything. But Harry didn’t have to take that thought in, either. He focused his eyes on the rock in front of them and climbed while Draco dealt with memories new to him, though old to Harry.
*
Draco shuddered as he finally struggled out of the overwhelming maze and mess of emotions Harry had pushed at him. There had been a pervading stink to them, not physical. No wonder Harry didn’t want to think about them now, and hadn’t been willing to talk about them in any detail.
Well, he had handed the details to Draco, though Draco knew it would take him a long time to sort through them and pick out individual days, or even weeks. But they had time. Draco planned that they would both survive this meeting with the riders, and whatever problem with Bodiless might follow it.
He reached out to put his hand in the middle of Harry’s back, and in that second, the sky darkened above them.
Harry raised winds in an immediate dome over them, and over Westshadow, who had stopped ahead and now stood there with all four heads tilted back, golden slotted eyes fixed on the riders. Draco counted five of them, more than enough to cast the given area in shadow. One rode the largest beast he had seen yet, and leaned over the side of its back to study them. Draco had no idea what it would see. He thought about lifting a hand and waving, but they might interpret that as a hostile gesture, too.
Finally, the largest beast dropped. The rider had its hood thrown back, and its claws lay lightly on the reins. The beast spread its wings at a cawed order-so Draco assumed, although of course they understood nothing of the riders’ language-and hovered above them. Part of their magic had to relate to the winds, Draco thought, or else their bones and muscles. There was no way giant creatures could simply hang in the air like that otherwise.
Westshadow looked back at Harry and Draco with one head, up to the riders with another, and ahead with the next two. The image that slammed into Draco involved him and Harry moving closer and touching those back two heads.
I don’t have any better ideas, Harry confessed when Draco glanced at him.
Draco nodded, and they did it. The shaggy hair of the mummidade felt silkier when he had a chance to concentrate on touching it, and warm, as though the bodies beneath the fur was blazing with heat. He shifted his stance so that he could look up at the hovering rider without straining his neck.
The beast had dropped nearer still. The rider was fanning its claws out towards them, but Draco had no idea what the gesture meant; it could have been anything from a threat or a warding to an invitation.
But there was no uncertainty about the way Westshadow had taken it. Long before Draco was prepared for it, the two quarters of Westshadow who had stood staring into the west turned, crouched like great cats, and leaped into the air.
Both of them soared up in the same long, curving springs that they had shown Draco and Harry in their memories when they tried to escape the birds. But Draco had seen those memories from a mummid’s perspective, and hadn’t realized how bloody high they could go. Up and up they soared, and spread their legs like wings when they reached the height of the beast’s claws.
The rider stared at them with a parted beak, watching them coming without an attempt to fend them off. Now and then, its black eyes stared at the ground, but it paid more attention when one mummid floated up to its beast’s beak and one floated up to it.
The rider hesitated, looked down at the ground several times as if trying to survey the distance between them, and then imitated Harry and Draco, splaying its claws flat on the mummid’s head.
The beast reacted to orders that seemed silent, leaning the edge of its beak on the mummid beside it, almost forcing it back to the ground.
Draco felt a silent, enormous breath draw it in all around them, and nearly looked down to see if the black mountain they stood on was breathing.
But instead, passing through all of them, came the closing of a great golden ring, a bond that made Draco sway and nearly fall. Harry supported him, and so did the mummid whose head he kept his hand on, and so, somehow, did the rider and the beast.
For a few seconds, they stood there, Draco hearing Harry’s heartbeat and the thrumming of others from beside him, and overhead, and under his feet.
Then Westshadow spoke. And it was real language, human language, not the images he had sent so far, although when Draco thought about it later, he had to admit that the rider probably interpreted it as his own language and Westshadow probably saw images, the way that the bond between him and Harry sometimes held pictures and sometimes words and sometimes emotions. It was a new channel of communication, and of course it would pass through their minds and pick up whatever was most conducive to its purpose there.
This is better. Now we can negotiate.
A shared heartbeat like a bell swayed them all, and Draco shivered. From his thoughts, welling up despite himself, came the realization that this was overwhelming and he hoped it would be over soon.
We do not like connecting this way, either, Westshadow agreed. But it does not need to be long. This is what we want.
And there was another blurred image of the meadow it had shown them once before, with riders flying and human houses and mummidade grazing. Draco wondered why he was still seeing it as a picture instead of words, then snorted. It would take less time to show the riders what they intended than explain every nuance.
The rider opened his beak. A rush of language came down the bond to Draco, flavored all the while with a haughty metallic tone that echoed a crow’s. Why should we let you have this? You would eat all the grass that our herds depend on and we would have to defend you as well as ourselves. What would we gain?
Westshadow flashed back an image of the mummidade standing against what Draco thought was a black mountain at first, and finally realized was an imagining of Bodiless. We can do this if we can bring enough of us through. We lost to it once because only a few of us lived in the north, and we need numbers to make up our strength. And when we lose one, our number and the bonds we can combine in are greatly limited. If you can guard us after the battle, though, we are willing to fight it.
Draco shuddered a little. He wondered if the mummidade had always had a concept of war, or if it was something that Bodiless had taught them.
On the other hand, they knew about the birds, and they had a conflict with them if nothing else. Draco had to admit that he didn’t know what was native to the mummidade and what wasn’t.
You will lose more than one if you face the Darkness in the North.
That name was almost certainly translated straight from the riders’ language, Draco thought. He liked it better than Bodiless.
We can help, Harry said, because of course he would. Draco would have liked to hiss at him to shut up, but when they were all joined like this, everyone else would hear, too. We might be able to help during the battle, and we would like a safe place. This meadow looks more like the-place we came from. Draco sensed this temporary bond probably couldn’t translate “Earth,” and maybe not the concept of “planet,” either. Our people would have more safety and company here.
The rider was silent for a long second, during which their shared heartbeats and the beast’s wings flapping were the loudest sound. Then he said, There are many more of us than of you walkers, and we are not all bonded to each other the way the leapers are. I do not have the wings to speak for everyone. I will have to go back and talk to them, and learn if this is something they would want.
We will wait, Westshadow had, and the two mummid hovering in the air dived down and landed near their other halves again.
Draco shuddered as the bond broke. He half-hoped they would manage to leave him out of it when they formed it again. Yes, it was incredible, but it was also threatening to his sense of self.
The rider wheeled back into the sky and screeched something at the others who hung behind him. They turned and traveled to the west with incredible speed.
Westshadow lay all its bodies down at once and shut its eyes. Draco turned to Harry. What do we do now?
We wait, Harry answered, and lay down with his hands behind his head and his eyes closed, leaving Draco to wonder if he was the only impatient person in the universe.
Chapter Twenty-Nine.
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