Chapter Thirty-One of 'Wondrous Lands and Oceans'- Settlements
Chapter Thirty.
Title: Wondrous Lands and Oceans (31/31)
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! This is the last chapter of Wondrous Lands and Oceans, but there will be one more story in the series, Here To Live and Die, which should start posting soon.
Chapter Thirty-One--Settlements
"I can't believe defeating Bodiless was as simple as that."
Harry opened one eye. He still felt like a rag that someone had picked up and wrung out to dry, and had to work hard to get a little spit into his mouth. At least the bed beneath him was soft, the piled grass and moss of the meadow. "Speak--for yourself. Simple? Fucking simple was it? Now he says it." He grunted and shut his eyes again.
"Well, I mean, we didn't have to go through even as many strategies as I would to win a chess game." Ron leaned forwards from his chair beside Harry's bed. Harry knew that because he could hear the wood, Transfigured from a boulder, creaking, but he refused to open his eyes and give Ron the satisfaction of looking. "I didn't think defeating Bodiless would be that simple, really."
"Speak for yourself," Harry said again. "You're also not the one who had other people reaching through his bond and humming in the back of his head and winding and doing Merlin knows what else to tie all of you together."
"That's true," Ron said, but in such an unabashed tone that Harry gave up on convincing him. "But I don't really understand why you're so tired, mate. Malfoy's not that tired, and he worked as hard as you did."
Harry smiled in spite of himself. Maybe Ron couldn't call Draco by his first name yet, but referring to him that way, without malice in his voice, was a good first step. "It has something to do with the magic I spent before that, trying to keep the camp safe from the winds that Bodiless was stirring up," he said sleepily. "Or that's what Open Wings is saying, through the mummidade."
"That's going to be strange, damn, living with magical creatures who are every bit as important and impatient as us," Ron muttered. Harry knew he was shaking his head, although he didn't open his eyes to see.
"It will be," Harry said. "But we'll get used to it, because we don't have a lot of choice." And he hoped, although he wouldn't say it, that relationships with the riders and the mummidade would give everyone else something to focus on than tension between the humans.
Ron touched his shoulder. "I reckon I ought to leave you to get some sleep," he said. "And--be proud, mate. You helped save us all, again."
"Helped," Harry repeated, and reached out, catching hold of Ron's hand and looking at him squarely, because this was important. "That's the important thing. The most important thing. All the rest of you were there. And because of that, the riders and the mummidade are willing to let us live in the meadow." He suspected their attitude would be much different towards humans who hadn't borne part of the cost of defending them.
Ron grinned back at him. "I always regretted that we couldn't help you more when you faced Voldemort," he whispered, glancing over his shoulder as though there was anyone else in the tent to flinch at the name. "But the last time pays for everything, right?"
"It should," Harry said. "If it's the last time, it means that I won't have to do any more world-saving, ever again. And that sounds fucking nice, let me tell you."
Ron laughed at him, and left. Harry listened to his footsteps striding across the ground outside for only a few minutes before he fell asleep.
Sometime before the morning, someone crawled into bed beside him and looped a ticklish arm over his ribs, but Harry knew exactly who it was, and only grunted at him before he went back to sleep.
*
Draco had to admit that life in the meadow was better than life in the camp beside the pool, and they'd only been here a few days. Well, properly here a few days, if you didn't count their first hostile encounter with the riders and the times they had soared over it on Harry's winds.
The green of the grass warmed and soothed Draco's eyes. He hadn't realized he missed Earth's colors so much. The grass was still not Earth grass, and the creatures that ate it had more differences from the animals of Draco's home planet the longer he stared, but looking out over it in the misty morning as he sprawled on the bed beside Harry, the differences wavered and blurred into distance.
The riders had fetched the Weasleys, Granger, and even Andromeda and Teddy from the camp with their beasts. It was the fastest way anyone could come with Harry still sleeping off his magical exhaustion, unless they were willing to pass through the silver oval. And not even Granger had wanted to, although she had seen Harry and Draco walk into one and come out alive.
The riders helped them pile up their beds, and gave them tents woven from billowing leather that Draco suspected came from the hides of their beasts. The riders didn't venture outside the meadow very often, Open Wings told Draco through the bond with the mummidade, but when they did, they preferred to sleep in a shelter rather than on the ground as their beasts rested. And Andromeda had begun to make houses, although so far there were only three--one for her and Teddy, one for Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, one for the werewolf and his wife and child. Draco saw his aunt standing in the middle of the meadow often, staring around with tear-blurred eyes.
Still trying to come to terms with her wild magic and the fact that she'll never see Earth again, Draco thought, and avoided her. He had little desire to speak with her without Harry between them to use as a buffer, anyway. Harry saw more good qualities in her than Draco ever would.
Teddy and the werewolf's daughter loved the meadow. They raced in laughing circles, and stared up with open mouths when gentle rain fell from the sky, and if they had been negatively affected by their part in the battle against Bodiless, there was no physical sign of it. Teddy did hate it when Draco gave him a bath, but Draco knew from speaking with Harry that the kicking and screaming was normal.
Ginny's bird apparently had given the riders' beasts some trouble. Open Wings had to speak sharply to keep Swoop from attacking it, and wherever it flew in the first days in the meadow--still not far from the ground, testing its wings--beasts circled above it, and aimed their paws at its neck. But the beasts were either more intelligent than Draco had thought or they picked up on their riders' acceptance of the creature, because soon they ignored it, other than a flip of their tails and flex of their claws when it first took off.
Draco helped with the transfer of Granger's precious greenhouses from the south to the north, since it seemed she trusted only him to get the spells right that secured the earth around the plants' roots and the panes of glass in between the great struts that formed the greenhouse walls themselves. Draco shrugged when he realized that trust and took the work. He was glad to get it.
It kept his mind off Harry and how still he lay in his bed.
No one could tell Draco why Harry had been affected more by the battle than all the rest of them. They had all been there, in the bond, and the mummidade had been the ones who made the connection across the distance possible, but none of them had collapsed like Harry had. Draco had held the bond open along with him, and he had only slept a day and then awakened with a pounding headache.
Harry slept on and on.
Draco stood in the middle of the meadow one morning and looked up to watch the riders sweeping past overhead. They continued to keep a watch on the skies, Open Wings had explained, because they couldn’t quite believe that Bodiless was gone. They had lived under the shadow of its threat so long, and now, within days of deciding to ally with the mummidade and the humans, it had supposedly vanished. Draco could appreciate the logic even as it gave him a sharp shiver in the middle of his heart, to know that people who had lived on Hurricane far longer than they had still doubted.
People.
Draco turned the thought over in his head, and then nodded slowly. Yes, he had come to think of the riders as people, helped by their general human outline. He knew it would take longer for their beasts and the mummidade, because they resembled animals more. But he would get there in the end. The mummidade were still the only ones who could bond everyone sufficiently to let them exchange words. They would have to accept that human-like brains dwelt within them in the end.
“Draco!”
Draco turned swiftly, thinking for a moment it was Teddy who had called his name, and then realized the voice was too clear, and too loud, and came from too high up. He blinked and focused on Granger’s face. She was racing towards him, and ignoring the turning heads, as well as the tightening wings overhead. There was still a certain instinct among the beasts to chase things that ran.
“What?” Draco asked, taking a step towards her in a motion that he hoped would prevent the beasts from diving.
“Harry’s awake.”
Draco had the impression that Granger was trying to say something else, something that blurred because of the impatient tightness in her throat and her harsh breathing, but he couldn’t stay for it. He began to run instead, and Granger came right behind him, clucking and trying to say whatever message she hadn’t delivered.
But Draco didn’t care. Harry was awake, and when he reached out, he discovered the soft throb of Harry’s emotions. He had almost given up on looking, which was why he hadn’t been the first one to learn he’d woken, the way he should have been.
But they were still alive, in a safer place now. Surely he would have the time to learn.
*
Harry put a hand to his head and then stretched his hands out in front of him. There was still an unfamiliar feeling of largeness to the way he moved, he thought, as though he had fingers he couldn’t see and limbs that extended beyond the ones that he had grown so far. He shook his head in wonder.
He didn’t know what had happened. But if this was the sole consequence of defeating Bodiless and fighting a battle as hard as the one he’d fought, then he’d take it.
“Harry.”
The world around him seemed to explode in white and gold light. Harry rose to his feet, staring. Draco was in the doorway of the tent, and looking at him with eyes like the sun.
Harry barely had time to spread his arms before Draco flung himself into them. Harry closed his eyes and cradled him close, murmuring into his ear. It seemed that Draco had been more affected by the time he spent asleep than Harry had been, even though he had these strange feelings. Draco’s breath came harder than it should have, even if he had run all the way across the meadow, and his grip made Harry’s ribs hurt.
“I thought you might be dead,” Draco whispered. “I thought you were never waking up. Everyone else seemed to recover, but you didn’t. Why is that?”
“I don’t know,” Harry whispered back, and cradled Draco as close as he could, stroking Draco’s sides up and down. “But I’m free now.” He hesitated, then sent the sensation of having an extra side to his arms down the bond to Draco. Maybe Draco would know what it was, or at least how to deal with it.
Draco reared his head back at once and felt along Harry’s arms, peering him in the face. “You don’t feel as though you’re knocking anything down when you move?” he asked. “Or heavier than normal?”
“Only in some parts of my body,” Harry admitted. “And no, I’m not actually making anything fall the way I would be if something was really there.”
“I was trying to tell you,” Hermione said from behind Draco in an injured voice.
Harry nodded and paid attention to her, ignoring the way Draco shifted beside him. Draco probably wished they were alone, but they would have some time like that soon enough. Right now, if Hermione knew what was going on, Harry wanted to hear it so he could get rid of this sensation.
“Ron noticed that he wasn’t able to make the winds stay away from you anymore, when he was sitting with you,” Hermione said. “And he always had been able to before. He kept the winds from disturbing you when you wouldn’t wake up. His magic to banish magic was strong enough for that.
“This last day, he couldn’t.” Hermione hesitated, then pushed ahead. “I think-I think the magic of Bodiless had to go somewhere when it was destroyed, Harry, and it went to you, maybe because you’re the one who’s had the wild magic longest.”
Harry frowned and shook his head. “I think I would have noticed if I could do more powerful magic,” he said, and held up a hand. A wind whistled down to him and around his head, but when he glanced at Draco, he smiled. Draco’s eyebrows had risen, and the bond between them trembled like clear water. “See? I can’t really call winds that are stronger than before. It must be something else.”
“Try to sense other magic,” Hermione said.
Harry tried, as much as he could try something when he had no idea what it would really imply or where he would probably have no idea if he succeeded, and shook his head a second later. “I don’t sense anything that’s different from what I felt before,” he admitted. “I know Draco is here, but he’s the only one I can feel.”
Hermione rapped her fingernail against her teeth, making Draco wince. Harry sent him a mental squeeze of the hand. He didn’t really like the sound, either, but he knew better than to disturb Hermione when she was on the track of a thought.
“Try something else, then,” Hermione said. “Look-Malfoy, Draco, why don’t you call your claws and hold them out?”
With a long, slow raising of his eyebrow that said clearly he was only doing this because Harry wanted to know about the strange sensations, Draco called his claws. Harry could feel him doing it through the bond.
And then Draco swore, and long cuts appeared in the side of the tent opposite them. Draco pulled his hands back and stared at them. Hermione was nodding, and her eyes were bright and wide and knowing.
“I didn’t grow them that long,” Draco murmured, turning his hands over. Harry could feel the way his heart was bounding, much harder than he was showing Hermione right now, but he didn’t look up or around, only reached along the bond to Harry for comfort. “I wouldn’t have wanted to cut the tent. What happened?”
Hermione took a deep breath. “Bodiless had power of its own, but I think it was also a repository of power. I’ve been feeling and mapping out the wild magic, and the valley you told me about was always the source of the strongest power I could feel-the direction you flew when Bodiless pulled on Draco. But now it’s gone. There’s no reason for that, unless the power went somewhere else.” She turned on her heel and stared directly at Harry.
“So, what?” Harry asked, and stared at his own hands the way Draco was looking at his. “I make other people more powerful?”
Hermione nodded rapidly. “I think the wild magic needs someone who can connect other people to it. Bodiless was probably that at first. Maybe the mummidade and the riders and the others, whatever other creatures there might be on Hurricane, even came to life because of Bodiless at first. It’s the source of the winds, you remember saying that, Harry? The place they blow from.”
“So when it died,” Draco began.
“Its own power died with it, but the gate it opens,” Harry continued.
“Opens through Harry now,” Draco finished, and stared at Harry in the way that Harry would have liked to stare at his own face in a mirror.
“Yes,” Hermione said. “I think that’s what you’re feeling, Harry. That extra heaviness is the extra power, a new dimension that your own magic opens through.”
Harry sat down on his bed. Draco sat beside him, and put a hand on his arm, asking without words if he was all right.
Harry nodded in response, and faced Hermione. “All right. All right. And this means-what? That the others have to be near me to use their powers now?”
Hermione shook her head. “I don’t think so. Ron was having trouble using his gift near you at all, and Andromeda’s built houses away from you, and I can map the wild magic in whatever direction I want to. But I think you do make us stronger, and maybe this meadow is going to become the source of the winds now.”
Harry swallowed. “Right,” he said. “So long as I don’t have to save the world again, then I think I can put up with this.”
“We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.” Hermione’s eyes were kind, kinder than Harry could remember them being since they were eleven. “It might be that you will have to save the world, if only by strengthening our magic to hold back a threat.”
Harry grunted. His mind was spinning with images of Bodiless, as much as it was possible to have those, and images of the ocean, and the mummidade, and the riders. What the fuck would happen next? Would he have to go to other places, to be responsible for people he had never met, to keep the magic flowing?
I don’t see why, Draco said, his voice as deep and cool as the ocean Harry had been picturing. Bodiless could stay in one place and still influence what it wanted to. Maybe there’s more than one reason that your wild magic is in the wind. You can reach out and touch distant places without moving from your own home.
Harry took a deep breath, and then nodded. He hated the thought of being restricted in any way. The battle with Bodiless was the last one he ever wanted to fight like that. He was twenty-one, and he had already fought one Dark Lord determined to destroy the world and one dark thing-that was the only word he could come up with for Bodiless-determined to destroy their little settlement on Hurricane. Maybe now, he could ignore the new problem that Bodiless had saddled him with and continue with a normal life.
That is the best way to look at it, Draco said in the back of his head, warm and soft and supportive.
So, when Hermione began to say something about how they needed to spend time thinking about what Harry could do now and studying the way the winds spread around Hurricane, Harry held up his hand and said, “Not right now. I just woke up from a coma, and I haven’t had time to celebrate being alive yet. Can’t it wait, Hermione?”
She paused and stared at him, and then her eyes softened as she nodded. “Of course it can. I’m sorry, Harry. I’m being thoughtless. But I wanted to make sure that you understood what I thought was happening.”
“You always need to make sure someone understands,” Draco muttered. “It’s the thing I like least about you.”
Harry nudged him in the ribs and continued speaking to Hermione so she wouldn’t feel compelled to take notice of Draco’s words. “Thanks. Let’s go out and enjoy our home, shall we?”
Draco took his hand and dragged him out through the tent flap, probably so that Hermione wouldn’t have a chance to say something else. Harry laughed and went with him. He was looking forward to seeing Teddy again, and Ron, and the others who had been in the back of his head during the battle, and even Andromeda.
And maybe we can have some time, together, Draco said slyly.
Harry bent towards him to kiss the back of his neck. Absolutely.
*
Draco rolled away from Harry and smiled sleepily into the night sky. That had been the best lovemaking session they’d had in a while.
Being in a coma does something for my libido, apparently, Harry said.
Draco hit him in the stomach and leaned his head on Harry’s shoulder, watching the stars. They were still unfamiliar, but now Draco could imagine how they would grow slowly more and more familiar as the years passed. And the patterns of Hurricane’s three moons would grow to mean more to him than the waxing and waning of Earth’s moon.
“We really are here to live and die,” he whispered to Harry, aloud, because he wanted to feel the vibrations of the words on his lips and tongue and feel through the bond what they did to Harry.
“We are,” Harry whispered back, and then turned his head sharply to the south, his nostrils flaring. Draco looked in that direction, but saw nothing except the winged guard of the riders and their beasts circling. The mummidade were glowing shapes grazing in the grass nearby.
“What?” Draco asked quietly. “Do you sense something else dangerous to the south?”
“Not dangerous,” Harry said, closing his eyes. “Different. The winds-I’m starting to realize that they react differently when they meet a species that can think. They get excited and move faster when they’re near the mummidade, and they want to help the riders fly. Maybe that’s just happening because I like the mummidade and the riders, and they’re blowing through me, now. I don’t know.”
“What can you feel to the south?” Draco asked, taking his hand. “More groups of humans?” For once, he was getting no more information through the bond than he would by asking the questions aloud. Harry’s mind was a swirling, confused cloud.
“Yes,” Harry whispered. “I can feel-I think I can feel Primrose.” He opened his eyes and smiled. “I’m glad she survived after all.”
“But there’s more than that,” Draco persisted. He knew that the shadow in the back of Harry’s eyes had another source. “What is it?”
“I can feel something else intelligent,” Harry said quietly. “Not birds. But something else, something that can think and fly. The winds tell me about their weight in the sky.” He hesitated. “And I think they’ve allied with the humans. Primrose is close to a large group of them.”
Draco squeezed his hand, and said nothing. As far as he was concerned, those people, or creatures, in the south, were of no concern until they came north. And they were well-protected here.
We can wait until they come, he whispered to Harry.
Harry turned and kissed him, and they settled back into the grass, the winds swirling around them and stirring the greenery into soft ripples, shadowed by the wings of the riders, the mummidade glowing among it like earthbound moons.
Draco thought of the dance that the mummidade might teach them, of the child that they might hold in their arms soon, and watch toddling through the green grass.
And then he paid attention, instead, to the dance that was being danced right now, under the stars, upon the earth.
The End.
Chapter One of Here to Live and Die.
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