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Here to Live and Die	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 5833 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Eleven—The Kires

            “Harry!”

            Harry whipped around when Ron called his name in that voice. It had been the one he would use through fireplaces in the last few years when someone in the Ministry had been harassing a member of his family. Harry had no idea why he’d be using it here, but he wanted to find out.

            He hurried away from the stretch of meadow that he’d been trying to turn into a garden without the use of a greenhouse, mostly for the native Hurricane grasses that they’d thought they could eat. Riders soared overhead as usual, keeping a guard on the herds and the mountains. Now and then one looked down at him and spread his or her arms in a way that Harry thought indicated the same thing as a headshake. They had no idea why someone would want to garden rather than live on meat all the time.

            Ron was standing on the small hill between two of the silver houses. Harry hurried up to him and opened his mouth to ask what was wrong.

            Ron’s hand on his arm, and the other, pointing hand, silenced him. Harry stared at the dark shape that had loomed up against the sky on the nearest foothill leading up to the mountains. It looked like a stag, with its long, looping antlers, but the body was more squat, and it was probably black, and Harry hadn’t seen anything on Hurricane that stood that still, even the riders’ beasts when they were watching them suspiciously.

            “Has anyone else noticed it yet?” Harry asked softly.

            “Hermione,” Ron said. “She came and told me. But I don’t think anyone else has. It just looks like part of a mountain unless you’re watching it from a height.”

            Harry nodded and reached out through the bond to Draco, who’d been sleeping in their tent. He came awake at once, and flickered back, Wait for me to come up to it before you approach it.

            Harry nodded again, since he had no intention of doing anything else, and said to Ron, “Did Hermione try to go near it?”

            “A few steps.” Ron’s voice was low, his hands wrapped around his wand as though it was a comforting shield to him, more than his ability to dispel wild magic. Then again, Harry was a little unusual in how thoroughly he’d come to depend on his wild magic instead of his wand. “But Hermione said she got the most awful headache when she did, like she was staring into the sun. She had to come back and rest for a little while before she could tell me about it.”

            Harry nodded, resigned. It seemed likely that this was another creature that had been kept at bay when Bodiless held the gateway, or had perhaps been attracted when Harry picked apart the storm a week ago. That left it up to him to deal with.

            You, and me.

            Draco had arrived at the bottom of the hillock on which Harry and Ron stood, and was staring imperiously upwards. Harry reached out, took his hand, and let Draco escort him to the bottom of the hill. The squat figure did seem to disappear against the skyline when they were on the ground, but now that Harry knew where it was, he only had to move his head a little and it appeared again.

            “What do we do?” Draco murmured to him.

            Harry sighed and straightened his shoulders. “Approach it. There’s nothing else to be done.”

            Sometimes I wish that you weren’t such a Gryffindor, Draco told him, sharp and dry, but he nodded when Harry turned to him. “I can’t come up with a course of action that makes more sense,” he admitted.

            Harry smiled back at him, and led the way towards the skyline. The figure didn’t move as they came near it, and neither did Harry feel that headache-like sensation Hermione had said she did. That was some small comfort.

*

            As they came closer and closer, Draco, straining his eyes to see, was sure of only one thing: this creature was nothing like any other they had encountered on Hurricane. He had thought it probably resembled the mummidade at first, but it didn’t, and the way it turned to face them as they approached the bottom of its hill only confirmed that.

            First, it had those long, crazily-branching antlers instead of horns. Draco thought he could see them bending back on themselves at some points, the bone folding neatly into points that then crossed like bridges. He shook his head. They looked immensely heavy, but also as if they wouldn’t be much good as weapons unless someone was obliging enough to walk right up to the creature.

            What, like us? Harry asked into his head.

            Draco gave him a mechanical smile back, but didn’t take his eyes off the new thing. He didn’t know what kind of magical impressions it might be making on Harry, and what he would come up with to tell the others. Draco knew only that he would give as detailed an account as he could of the way it looked.

            Its body was indeed squat, dressed in black fur quite as shaggy as the mummidade’s. But it flowed loosely across its body instead of curling, and the overall effect was of something large and low-slung, a weasel rather than a goat. Draco edged to the side so that he could see the eyes better as Harry stopped in front of it and made a low bow.

            You think it’ll respond to that? Draco did ask, because it seemed a senseless gesture to him.

            We might as well try it and see. At least I don’t think that it’ll take it as threatening.

            Unless it thinks that you’re showing it antlers or you intend to clash heads with it.

            Harry threw Draco a subdued but irritated glance as he straightened back up and nodded to the creature. “My name is Harry Potter,” he said aloud. Draco thought that was stupid, too, since there was no sign the creature could understand English, but Harry poked him in the side. “This is Draco Malfoy. We’re the representatives of a new species on Hurricane. What are you?”

            The creature came one slow step forwards. Its feet were odd, Draco saw, round, with claws branching out at equal distances on all sides. The tracks it left were similarly odd, resembling a five-pointed star in some ways. The creature shuddered to a stop not far from Draco and regarded them with huge, luminous dark eyes, too big for its face. And the fur didn’t extend up to the edges of them, Draco noted, leaving a bare socket instead.

            The creature had magic, Draco knew. It had to, living on Hurricane, but more than that, he could feel the power eddying around them, sharper blasts than Harry’s winds, but smaller, perhaps as powerful as his breezes.

            The creature finally curled its lips back from its teeth and spoke—in English. Draco knew he jumped, but he couldn’t have concealed his shock even if his father was standing by with a disapproving frown. “I am kires. I am a representative.”

            Draco wanted to smash it in the face, because that was the only reasonable response to hearing English flow out of the mouth of a beast. It had to be a trap, an enemy. But Harry got there first, and held his fist back; Draco didn’t actually look down to see it whether he did it with his hand, or with a wind. He couldn’t take his eyes off the thing that had called itself a kires and spoken to them like a human.

            “I think I know something about what you are,” Harry said, his voice relaxed and casual. He was holding Draco back with wind, Draco saw when he glanced down. Harry’s own hands were folded across his middle, the tendons flexed across the back, but his voice remained steady. “You are a reflection of us, aren’t you? You pick up on and mirror back the responses of other creatures that you meet. That’s how you can speak English.”

            The kires stared at them, eyes flickering. Then a shade of green invaded the right eye, and a shade of grey the left. Draco started. He didn’t know how he could even properly see the colors, with the background of the eye being so dark and the angle he was standing at. But they were there nonetheless, as bright as though he and Harry had suddenly looked into a mirror.

            “Yes,” the kires said, and its five-pronged feet dug into the dirt as it bowed its antlered head to them. Draco had no doubt now that the bow meant the same thing to the kires as it did to them. “I am a representative of the magic. I can speak English. I could speak the language of the ones that you call riders, if I could look into their eyes.”

            “What about the mummidade?” Harry asked. Draco bit his lip, and wished that he knew what to think, what to ask. Harry appeared as calm and confident with the kires as he did with the mummidade now. Draco wasn’t sure that he liked the idea of another being on Hurricane that could read their minds, as this creature would have to do in order to reflect them as much as it was.

            It doesn’t interfere with our bond, Harry told him. I don’t believe that even it could do that, since it reflects our actions rather than our thoughts.

            How do you know that?

            It’s repeating our words, not our thoughts.

            But it’s still using English words that it hasn’t heard us use. It hasn’t heard us talk about the riders, for instance.

            Who knows how long it’s spent observing us? Harry said, shaking his head a little as he refocused on the kires, and its answer, which was coming more slowly than the near-instantaneous flash of their thought-responses through the bond.

            “I cannot interfere in their groups, their pairings,” said the kires. “They are too tight, and they shut me out. And I have no bond partner. They would reject me as a fully-formed individual.” Already it was standing more easily, and watching them with wide and fascinated eyes. Now the right eye was fully green, and the left fully grey. Draco noted that, and bit his lip. “I have no bond partner.”

            “Yet you look something like them,” Harry said, and gestured to its goat-like body. “I would have thought you were one of them, except for the antlers.”

            “I took the antlers from you,” said the kires. “They’re important to you, somehow. But everyone thinks a lot about the mummidade, and I took my appearance from those thoughts.”

            “Then you can read our minds,” Draco blurted, realizing as he said it that the creature’s voice had shifted. Now it sounded more like Harry than it had when it began speaking. “But you act as though you can’t, at other times.”

            The kires glanced at him, the grey flickering stronger for a second before dwindling to a dot like a pupil that almost faded. “I do not know what you mean by that. I pick up on the things that are important to people. You spend a great deal of time conversing with the mummidade, and so it is not surprising that I would take on their appearance. You think in English and speak in English. Why would I not know how to speak it?”

            “But some of those are things that we haven’t voiced aloud,” Draco pointed out, taking a step towards the kires. Harry’s winds tried to restrain him again, but Draco formed his claws and cut through them. He was not going to have his mind read by some bloody Hurricane creature that probably didn’t even have a concept of Legilimency. “They’re private. I want to keep them from you and your kind.”

            The kires’s five-pronged paws dug into the earth again, but it said only, “I don’t think I have any other kind except me. I am the only one I’ve seen, and I’ve wandered through Hurricane since before the golden ones went past.” It paused a second, ears cocking towards Harry, and then added, “The Tssisid? Is that what you call them? It’s an awkward name.”

            “You only remember back to then?” For some reason, Harry’s voice bubbled with excitement. Draco reached out to the bond, and once again encountered a racing torrent of golden thoughts that it was difficult to keep up with. “Do you think you might have been formed out of the storm of wild magic unleashed before then?”

            “I feel some kinship to storms,” said the kires, and ducked its antlers again. “Although I didn’t know what kinship meant until I felt you thinking about the child you have, and some of the Weasleys thinking about their relations to each other.”

            Draco shivered. The thought that the kires could pick up on things that were important to him, without even meaning to, and use them…

            The kires abruptly snorted and turned to face Draco, eyes wide and head flipping back. “That’s what privacy means? I’m sorry. I wouldn’t want someone taking mine either.” It paused and its paws dug in further. “And that’s what an apology is.”

            Draco wanted to back off. This time, it was Harry’s arm that held him in place. Harry gave a handsome little nod to the creature, ignoring the fact that Draco wouldn’t have wanted him to do that at all, and said to Draco, “I think that he probably happened, or started existing, or came into the world, or whatever word you want to use, because of the death of Bodiless and the release of all that wild magic. I’m surprised that he hasn’t sought us out before now.” He smiled at the kires. “Where did you find your name?”

            “The air across the mountains was thinking it.” The kires stood there with eyes tightly shut, head tilting slowly and wisely back and forth. Then it opened its eyes and leaped into the air with back paws pressed tightly together. “Yes, yes, it was Bodiless! I didn’t know what that meant when you first said it, but now I do.”

            “Good,” Harry said, still smiling. “I was concentrating on it.” He nodded to the kires and turned back to Draco. “I think we should invite him into the camp.”

            “And that’s what a him is,” said the kires, a little more doubtfully. “Well. If it’s important, then I can be one.”

            “Are you mad?” Draco hissed back at Harry. “They’ve only now got used to a few of the changes that you made, and now you want to make another one?”

            “The wild magic already made me,” said the kires, in a voice of tragic dignity. Draco wondered despite himself how long it would be before the kires decided that he knew about the concepts of tragedy and dignity. “You don’t need to explain me to the others as a change that you made.” He looked in the direction of the meadow, and his eyes had changed from half-green and half-grey to a strange mixture of colors, split like the slices of a pie. Draco thought he could see the gold of a mummid’s and the black of a rider’s. “I want to know the others. I’m awfully lonely.”

            “He’s becoming more human as we stand here,” Harry muttered to Draco. “Or capable of understanding and taking from the people whose minds he can read, anyway.”

            “I don’t want to think of it as taking,” the kires interjected. “It’s not like I want to do this, you know, and break your privacy. But it happens, and it seems to be what I am. And some of the things I can hear aren’t interesting, but I can understand them. I’m not trying to be you. I’m just trying to be something.”

            Draco kept himself from clapping his hand over his eyes with an effort. This was the kind of change that Harry made without trying, and he had just barely reassured the others that he could control storms when something new came up.

             "You are very frightened of new things," said the kires, turning towards Draco and tilting its head so that the heavy antlers fell to the side. "Is that common for your people? Did creatures that looked like me hurt you?" When Draco stayed silent, it tore up several clods of earth with its paw. "I don't want to read your thoughts, but how else am I supposed to communicate or know what the difference is, if you won't speak to me?"

           Draco did what he hadn't wanted to do, and turned to Harry for help. It was true that Harry got asked to deal with so many more things than anyone else, but he had been the one that had released the kires, no matter how accidentally, and he might have more idea about how to deal with this than Draco did. Plus, he was more sympathetic to the creature, and that would help.

*

            Harry put out his hand out and rested it on the flank of the kires. The kires turned and stared at him as though it was the strangest thing that anyone had ever done for it.

            But, if what it—no, he—said was true, it was the first thing anyone had ever done for him. Other than teaching him information by filling the air around him with thoughts, most of which weren’t even directed to him and might be teaching him unfathomable things, things that didn’t matter and would increase his loneliness.

            Thanks to the Dursleys, Harry knew all about the loneliness of people doing things around you but never for you, chattering and incidentally teaching you things, but not with the intention of helping you.

            Of course you would relate to him that way, Draco’s voice said in his head, heavy. I should have guessed it, after what you told me about your childhood.

            Harry ignored Draco. He was bewildered about how to deal with the kires, but Harry wasn’t. That was enough reason for Harry to plunge ahead and do it his own way, at least until the kires told Harry he wanted to do something else.

            “Look,” Harry said. “There was a powerful force in the world before you were—born, a force called Bodiless. It took up a lot of magic.” He paused. “You know what magic is?”

            The kires gave him an expression that Harry could swear he’d last seen on Hermione’s face. “I would hardly be here if I didn’t know, would I?”

            Harry smiled at him. “Well, Bodiless really didn’t have much power in and of itself. Magic flows into the world from another source, like a stream flowing down a mountain.” He paused, but the kires bobbed his head, evidently understanding what he meant by the words and the simile. “But Bodiless chose to keep a lot of the magic around itself and use it for its own purposes. We killed Bodiless. Now there’s more magic flooding into the world, and I have some of it to use as the gateway, but I don’t want to keep it all for myself. I want to let it flow down. I think some of that magic created you, because it’s not been held in one place now.”

            The kires planted his hooves beneath him. “So I don’t really have any parents,” he said. “The magic created me.”

            Harry nodded. “But something gave you the antlers and the five-pointed paws and the name kires,” he said. “Do you remember who?”

            “The name,” the kires whispered, and his eyes were full now, brightly green and grey and brown and black and gold, in alternating prisms that Harry had to admit were beautiful to look at. “I think it was blowing around the mountains. Something up there thought it, but when I tried to find those creatures, they always fled from me. I think they had wings, and I can’t keep up with them when they have those.” He reached a paw, flexing it and watching as the earth and grass fell away from the prongs. “What about you? Are you going to fly away from me?”

            Harry shook his head. “You should be welcome in our meadow, especially if you can communicate with all different kinds of people. We need someone like that. The mummidade can join us in a communication bond, but it involves bringing a lot of people together, and only one of them—a group of four mummidade called Westshadow—wants to do it. If you can talk to people and learn and teach them about each other, then you’ll be more than welcome.”

            The kires picked up his feet and put them down again, faster and faster. Harry watched, wondering if he had said the wrong thing and upset him, but then the kires spun away from him, and Harry realized what he was watching.

            It was a dance, the first of its kind ever performed on Hurricane, the first one the kires had ever done, probably.

            The kires sang as he danced, little huffs of air, and his fur grew sleeker and blacker and lay more smoothly along his shoulders. Then his antlers shrank a little, and he turned a more stag-like face towards Harry. But his eyes still shone in those beautiful colored prisms.

            Only you would find something this confusing beautiful, Draco muttered in the back of Harry’s head.

            Harry tried to explain that it wasn’t confusing, that the kires picked up concepts and words and ideas from the people around him as he had just explained he did, but Draco rolled his eyes and glanced away. Harry found Draco’s hand and squeezed it. He knew Draco would probably need some special attention in their tent that night to make up for Harry neglecting him during the day, and Harry was prepared to give him that.

            “You need to name me now.”

            That request, Harry hadn’t anticipated, no matter how non-confusing he thought the kires’s relationship with human beings and other species would be. He blinked and turned to the kires. “Why? I thought you were content with your species name.”

            “What’s a species?”

            Harry concentrated as hard as he could on the differences between mummidade and humans and riders, and the kires snapped his head down. “Yes, but you don’t go around calling yourself human all day,” he pointed out. “That’s only a way to distinguish you by groups. If another kires ever shows up, then I might need that, but in the meantime, I need a name.”

            “We ought to name you Nuisance,” Draco said.

            The kires stared at him for an unnervingly long period of time, then snapped his antlers down and waggled his ears on either side of them. “I agree,” he said. “That’s what I am to you, and therefore, that’s what you should call me.”

            “But he didn’t mean that,” Harry said, with a warning glare in Draco’s direction. “The word isn’t a nice one.”

            “But it’s what he thinks of me, and I like the concept of annoying someone out of his complacency,” said the kires. “Call me Nuisance.”

            Harry tried to argue with him, but Nuisance could apparently turn deaf when he wanted to, along with all the other human concepts he was absorbing, and Harry finally gave up with a sigh and turned to look at Draco. “Then you can explain to the others how he got that name.”

            “Why?” Nuisance asked, springing down the hill in the direction of the meadow. “I’ll tell them myself.”

*

            SP777: The riders do have their own names for themselves, but they go by “riders” in the interspecies communication bonds. So there’s not really a different name for their group that the humans know of.

            And thanks for commenting.
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Here to Live and Die