Chapter Three of 'Reap the Hurricane'- Beneath a Storm-Blue Sky
Chapter Two.
Title: Reap the Hurricane (3/19)
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 Three-Beneath a Storm-Blue Sky
Hurricane was beautiful.
Harry thought that continually during that first day as they spread and scattered across their new world, most of the wizards that he didn’t know traveling out of sight. If they were scared of him, that was fine. Harry didn’t expect to see them again unless they really wanted his help.
They had come into the middle of a golden plain, the grass rising to the height of their shoulders and then spreading away in endless ripples, clothing hills that rolled gently and blurred on the edge of sight. There was little shelter here, and Molly led them, the first night, to higher hills with darker grass that straddled the line between red and orange. They huddled there as the wind danced around them, their wizardspace tents firmly fixed to the ground. According to the information the first Unspeakables through the gate had learned, Hurricane was in the middle of its long spring. They didn’t need to fear snow.
But they needed to fear the wind. And the wind was the lord of the plains.
Harry had assumed they would sleep through the first night, worn out by the walking and the excitement, and it seemed that Teddy and Victoire intended to. But the howling shriek that traveled from one end of the sky to the other tore him, Ron, and Hermione out of their exhaustion somewhere in the middle of the night. Harry sat up, answering Hermione’s quiet questions and Andromeda’s sleepy murmur with a shrug, and then lifted the flap of the tent.
He thought for a moment he was looking out on a black ocean. The plains, which had looked spiky and rippling even after blue-black night fell, now seemed flat.
Then he understood. All the grass was pressed down by the wind storming over it, and when he moved a few steps away from the tent and the protective charms wrapped around it, the wind came and stormed over him.
Harry coughed, unable to breathe, too much air assaulting his lungs at once. He felt his feet leave the ground, and the gale curled around him, as though it would hold him and protect him from anything he might encounter in his wild flight across the sky-until it smashed him against a hill or mountain.
He pictured the flat plain for a moment, even as his lungs labored and his hands flailed, and he thought of how far he might fly before he crashed, how far the wind had to fly, unhindered.
Then he remembered who and what he was, and reached out with his magic and called the wind to him.
The storm resisted, slipping through his fingers like handfuls of glassy water, and Harry called up the magic that roared in him and flung it into the teeth of the air.
For a moment, he felt as though he stood at the edge of a perfectly balanced mountain, as if he could feel the dirt slipping away beneath his feet and the stone striving to hold him up at the same time. Then the storm altered its tone around him, singing back to the power that he threw at it instead of fighting with it, and Harry landed gently back on the ground, in the middle of the tiny, slender mounds of bowed grass.
His own winds wrapped him, cocooned him, and beyond them was the storm, so fast and so fleet that Harry knew he could never catch it. He could only make it listen to him, a little, and that might be enough to keep them safe, to retrieve anyone caught in the gale, to make their houses safe when they got around to building them. This was not a tame world. Harry could feel the wildness of the magic that danced around him, with the whole of this planet for its running ground.
But it might be negotiated with. Taught to dance with them, instead of opposed to them. There was no hostility to the magic, either, the way Harry had sometimes felt when he pushed against the power of Dark artifacts.
This was a new world.
Harry knew his friends would be worried about him, and that he should really go back to the tents as soon as possible. But he stood there a few minutes anyway, or what would be minutes by the clocks of the wizarding world, his eyes shut as he breathed in the clean, cool air that quickened as it was ripped away from his lips.
When he opened his eyes, he saw something pale in the darkness in front of him. And he went towards it, walking, his body floating as though Hurricane had no gravity, suspended by the contention between his magic and the storm’s.
Malfoy lay on the ground, cradled in the unintentional hollow at the foot of one of the tiny hills. Harry bent over him, placing his fingers gently at the base of his throat, feeling for a pulse.
*
He hadn’t been prepared at all. He had heard about the storms that covered Hurricane, but he had also thought that protective charms to anchor him to the ground would be enough, since this was a world where magic worked. He lay down near the foot of the same hills that he had seen Potter and company reach earlier that day (another charm had allowed him to track them across the endless plains). He didn’t have a tent, but if the main threat was the wind and not rain, then an Impervious Charm wrapped around him should do.
Draco only knew his mistake when he opened his eyes and found himself hanging dozens of meters above the earth.
He flailed his arms and legs as though he was swimming, which helped not at all. He struck out with his wand, and the charms seemed to slide off the wind like water. He tried to hold his breath and cast a spell that would tell him which direction the wind was, and it simply vanished and melted away from him. And then the wind had nearly stolen the wand from his hand. Draco had to cuddle it against his chest. If he lost that, he was worse than dead.
He didn’t remember hitting the ground, but his muscles remembered for him, and Draco groaned as all of them tried to tell him so at once. When he would have sat up, though, there were cool fingers on his throat and a voice murmuring to him to lie still. Draco reached for his wand with his left hand, the one tucked out of sight. He could still take on any attacker, and he seemed to have found, by sheerest accident, a place that was sheltered enough from the storm to let the magic work.
“Hush,” the voice said, more familiar now that the tones were angrier, and a bright light glowed in front of him, a Lumos like a flame. Draco stared. Potter was kneeling next to him, his wand lighting his face, flat and still with anger. “I’m trying to save your life, you prick.” He bent down and moved his wand over Draco’s body, murmuring what sounded like diagnostic charms.
Draco blinked. He wondered for a moment if the charms were a blind and Potter meant to kill him, but he could have left Draco here to die of any injuries he’d sustained if that was the case. And he had probably learned the relevant charms taking care of Teddy.
“What happened?” he whispered. “Are we back in your tent? Did you move me?” He looked around, trying to ignore the burning sensation in his left leg and the one creeping up the center of his chest, but he saw no pale and welcome walls of a tent, only the blue-black forever.
“No, we’re in a shelter I created from the wind,” Potter said, and his voice was abstracted. “Look, Malfoy, you have a fracture in your leg and internal damage. I can heal you, but it’ll mean letting my magic run directly through your body. Do you want to do that, or would you rather that I transport you back to our camp and let Angelina do what she can? She’s a trained Healer, but she doesn’t have access to all the Potions ingredients she would in the wizarding world.”
Draco blinked, and swallowed. Then he said, “How in the world can you heal internal damage, Potter?” His voice seemed thick and slow. His head spun, and he had to lay it down on the marvelously flat ground.
“My magic does what I ask it to do,” Potter said, and leaned back and looked him in the eye. “As long as it’s sufficiently grand. It doesn’t like to do small things, like Cleaning Charms. What do you think, Malfoy? It’s your choice.”
Draco closed his eyes. He swallowed. He was starting to feel so much pain now that he wondered how Potter could ask him to make a coherent or important decision. He wondered if it was shock that had preserved him so far, and the pain soared again, and he decided that he didn’t have the time to worry about that.
“You’re going to hurt me?” he whispered.
“As far as it’s possible, no,” Potter said. His voice sounded more distant now, and bubbling on the other side of an underwater wall. “But I’d have to hurt you to move you, I think. I could float you, but I don’t know whether that would increase the internal damage. I could hold the leg steady as I went, but-”
“Get on with it,” Draco snarled, and turned his head to the side and closed his eyes. He didn’t know if he was going to live. He didn’t know what was going to happen next. He didn’t know whether Potter might be the death of him after all.
But he had come here for reasons other than the ones he had told Potter, and if he died here…well, he might as well die here as have stayed in the wizarding world.
*
When Malfoy gave him permission, Harry didn’t wait. He closed his eyes and reached for the feeling of power in himself, the ability that told him he could do this, and which he hoped he had cause to trust where Malfoy was concerned.
The air in front of him and around him bucked. Then it twitched. Then it sighed, and collapsed. Harry kept his eyes closed, his hands moving around him, driving it forwards. It whipped away from him, and in, and through, and down.
He felt Malfoy gasp. The magic was traveling through him thanks to the air he breathed, which Harry was best at manipulating. He still kept his eyes shut, though, because the magic would obey him implicitly, and if he was hurting Malfoy, then he could end this experiment at once.
Not really an experiment, whispered the memories at the back of his mind that had been another reason for emigrating.
Harry did his best to ignore the whisper. He didn’t want to think about the mistake he had made, healing someone who had then turned on him. But at least it meant that he had the experience to know that healing Malfoy was not utterly impossible.
The air twitched again, and then it began to swirl through Malfoy’s body, oxygen blending with his blood, driving his heart, making his lungs pump. This was the part that Harry didn’t understand as well, and he simply had to keep his eyes closed and concentrate on what he wanted done, rather than the mechanics of it. His hands continued to move, his brain continued to work.
And then he felt the pain dissolve, the blood concentrating around Malfoy’s internal wounds, stopping the interior bleeding, at least. Harry didn’t think he could heal the damage to the organs right away, but he could encourage the healing functions of the body with more air, stronger, purer, delivered faster than it could be with Malfoy merely breathing, and he did that, and he did that, until his body strained and he knew that he had to let the magic go or damage his brain.
He opened his eyes. Malfoy lay in front of him, still breathing, and with fewer marks of pain on his face. Harry nodded, and then turned and stabilized the leg. That, he really didn’t think he could do anything about, except ensure that Malfoy floated instead of dragged until they reached Angelina.
“Potter,” Malfoy whispered.
“Yes?” Harry bent down. There was the possibility that he had caused more pain than he had relieved, no matter what his intentions, and he wanted to hear from Malfoy if that was the case.
“What did you do?”
Harry smiled a little. “Made the air flow faster through your body. It worked better this time,” he added thoughtfully. He was thinking of the reports he had read on Hurricane, the ones that the initial Unspeakables sent through the portals had brought back, and something he had thought was there but no one else had seen. Well, at least no one else that Harry had spoken with. Perhaps he wasn’t wrong after all, perhaps it existed.
“And all that-it feels better,” Malfoy muttered. He tried to move, and gasped aloud. “Not my leg, though.”
Harry nodded. “I thought about trying to blow the pieces of the bone back together, which I think I could do, but I would have nothing to hold them. Unless I set up a little whirlwind, and, well, I’m not ready for that level of control.” He yawned. He thought he would have a hard time simply holding the patch of motionless air clear around them as they walked, or floated, back to his family. The wandless magic did take a toll on him, something Hermione thought he should pay more attention to.
“I think that I wouldn’t want that,” Malfoy said, and his voice pierced and cut through the fog that had started to envelop Harry’s mind. “A whirlwind inside my leg?”
“Inside the blood and bone, yes,” Harry said, and blinked, and managed to come back to himself a little. “I hope that you won’t mind flying on the wind a little.” He had decided that was a better alternative to walking and holding the wind out. Let it bear them, as long as his magic could convince the storms of Hurricane to behave and be gentle.
Malfoy was silent. Harry nodded and reached out, ripping the space around them and calling to the winds sweeping and flooding around and beyond that.
The air came down and picked them up. Harry didn’t experience the intense exhilaration he had before; he was just too tired. He leaned his head on the wind as he would on a pillow and shut his eyes. He knew that Malfoy was just beyond him, stretched flat across the air in the best position to accommodate his leg. Although Harry listened with the edges of his magic, he couldn’t sense Malfoy’s bleeding starting again. He grunted in satisfaction, his breathing smoothing out.
He would wake when they landed. In the meantime, a precious moment of snatched sleep was not to be disdained. It would make his magic stronger later when he needed to use it to protect someone else.
*
Draco didn’t know how he could be sure, with the sounds of the storm around them as they were carried rapidly back in the direction of the mountains, but he thought Potter was snoring in his sleep.
Yes, his sleep. Potter was the only wizard Draco knew who would go to sleep in the middle of being carried across leagues of plain by a magical wind that Draco could feel the power in. There was magic here and to spare, slopping around in random directions, spinning out in the storms. Draco was sure that was the reason the storms were so powerful and so frequent. Either let out the magic somehow, or it would build up and make the world uninhabitable, even for the grasses and the rare bounding creatures that were the only living things Draco had seen so far.
Draco flexed his fingers as his thoughts began to move again. His leg was held immobile, and as comfortable as it could be without full healing. He felt nothing of the intense pain that he had before, either, when it came to the smashed internal organs he had endured in his chest.
The wild magic loose and roving in this world meant something. Of course, it had meant that the wizards who had explored this world had reported it as dangerous, and that meant fewer immigrants would come to Hurricane. But in and between and around that, there was something else, something more.
Draco thought few people would probably pick up on it, because their fathers hadn’t made them read ancient magical theorists when they were young. But he could feel the interest prickling and sliding through him, and it was certainly more than intense enough to return to him now, when he had nothing else to do.
Wild magic sloshing around people changed them. Sometimes it changed the nature of spells that could be performed; some people thought that was why Hogwarts had been established, to create a place where magic would be tamer, under human control, and spells could be standardized. As Hogwarts-trained wizards spread across Britain, they could make their houses and villages places of the same kind, and wild magic had diminished.
But for individuals bathed in the full rush of it…
Why were there no more wizards like Merlin? Lucius Malfoy had asked, digging through books and asking the questions aloud so that his young son could share in them, too. Why were powerful wizards like the Dark Lord and Dumbledore so rare now, when once common wizards had performed wonders? It was not lost knowledge. Since Hogwarts and the time of the Founders, knowledge was better-preserved and passed-on than ever before. And there were plenty of wizards who would be interested in keeping the knowledge alive for themselves even if they never shared it.
No, Lucius Malfoy had believed, that had to do with the decline of the wild magic. When it was rushing around the world, it could be tapped by any wizard, just as plants tapped water and sunlight, to grow in strength.
He had even theorized, in the last feverish days before they took him to Azkaban and he was trying to find some explanation for the failure of their side in the war, that the destruction of the warded home at Godric’s Hollow had left the wild magic to descend on the infant Harry Potter, and that was one reason he had been strong enough to stand up to the Dark Lord and defeat him. And his mother’s sacrifice, of course, but there must be some other way he had survived a basilisk, the Dark Lord in the graveyard, the Cruciatus Curse with his mind intact.
Draco turned now, as much as he could with the wind pulling his hair, and stared at the motionless Potter in front of him, lying there with his head flat as though on a bed and his nostrils fluttering with his snores. Yes, Draco knew he was snoring, even if he couldn’t hear him.
Perhaps Potter’s case was special, then. Perhaps he had lived outside domesticated wizarding spaces for long enough that he had grown his own wild magic, although Draco didn’t think that much of it could be found in the sterile Muggle environment where Potter had spent the majority of his life.
But here, on Hurricane, in a world where wind dashed back and forth and blew against the skin of everyone, where the air filled their lungs, where every breath had the potential to turn wild…
Perhaps all of them could have what Potter had.
It was a satisfaction, to think that.
*
“That was stupid, Harry.”
Harry serenely ignored the shame that he knew Hermione wanted him to feel, and turned to Angelina, who had kneeled over Malfoy the minute Harry woke her up and was frowning down at his leg. “Can you heal him?”
“They taught me spells for simple fractures like this,” Angelina said, and smiled up at him. “I’d use the Skele-Gro, but I think we should save that for the more serious breaks that we’re going to have in the future.”
Harry nodded his consent back, and then turned and motioned to Hermione. Mostly by default, she and he were the leaders. They were the ones who had organized their friends and family to emigrate, so they were the ones who had to answer the hard questions and come up with solutions to problems that no one else had even imagined. Hermione had brought seeds for Potions ingredients that would be difficult or impossible to get in Hurricane, which wasn’t something that would have occurred to Harry.
But he could read people better than she could, at least since the war, and he knew he would win the argument he reckoned, by the stubborn set of her shoulders, that they were due to have.
She led him a good distance from the tents before she turned around and frowned at him. He knew that Teddy and Victoire had sometimes overheard their rows in the past, and ever since he’d told that to Hermione, she was as eager as he was to keep knowledge of them from the children if at all possible.
“We can’t waste valuable time and ingredients on him,” Hermione said softly.
“Why? Because he’s not a Weasley?” Harry folded his arms and examined her in a leisurely way. “Neither am I. Neither is Andromeda or Angelina. Or Teddy. That’s a stupid argument, if it’s the one you’re going to make.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions again,” Hermione said, and rubbed at her face. “No. What I meant is that he won’t thank us for it, and he won’t repay us with labor in any way. He won’t help us plant crops or raise houses or learn the magic of this world. Why would he? He thinks we’re useless.”
Harry paused and blinked. That was actually a good argument, and one he could respect. And Hermione was right. They would struggle to survive here, no matter how well-prepared they thought they were. They couldn’t spare time for a layabout. Andromeda, who had mourned herself almost to death in the first year since the war, was better now, but Harry had warned her she would need to contribute to their efforts in Hurricane, if only by watching Teddy and Victoire while the others did more active work.
But he didn’t have that feeling about Malfoy. If nothing else, Malfoy understood debts and prices, and he would know that ingratitude wouldn’t get him closer to his aunt and cousin.
“I think that he’ll thank us for this,” Harry said at last, after closing his eyes and standing there with the distant echo of the wind on his face while he thought. The windstorm had died down as quickly as it had arisen. The initial explorers in this world had named Hurricane for the changeability of its weather as much as its violence. “Because he knows that he would have died tonight if not for me. And he’ll want to stay close to us because he probably can’t survive on his own. If he wants to take advantage of what we’ll build, he’ll need to contribute to it.”
Hermione folded her arms, and then dropped them and sighed. “You’ve already decided that he’s staying, haven’t you?”
Harry smiled at her. “I saved his life. That gives me a certain bond with someone, Hermione. Don’t worry, he’ll never challenge the way I feel about you and Ron. But I do feel that I owe him something.”
“He won’t thank you for that part, either,” Hermione muttered, but she hesitated. “If you feel that we can trust him.”
“To the limited extent that his self-interest takes him,” Harry said. “And I never thought Malfoy was stupid. Just short-sighed and vengeful. That combination can make someone seem stupid. Well, he has to have overcome some of those handicaps if he planned his own emigration.”
“He wasn’t prepared tonight,” Hermione muttered.
“It was only chance that we were,” Harry said quietly. “We’ll need to have sturdier shelters before the wind comes again. I only survived because my magic is akin to the wind.” He turned his head up to the sky, wondering when he could seek it again, and feel the magic shouting out to his blood in greeting.
“Just be careful, Harry,” Hermione said. “And you’ll probably be the one who needs to deal with him, since the rest won’t want to, except maybe Andromeda.” She paused as she started to turn back. “Why did you save him?”
Harry stared at her. “What kind of question is that?”
Hermione smiled a little and walked away. Harry followed her, shaking his head. She was the one who ought to understand his motives in rescuing Malfoy if anyone did. She was always telling him since the war that he was in danger of sinking down into himself and his devotion to Teddy and not caring about anyone else.
But Malfoy had the potential to be important to Teddy. And Harry didn’t want to leave someone to perish on the wind when he could protect them. That was the way it was.
None of which means that Malfoy isn’t going to be a pain in the arse.
Chapter Four.
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