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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 Thirteen—Hyaline

            “They say that they expect more storms from the north. This is the season when they build up and start causing problems, after all.”

            Nuisance sounded grave as he relayed what the riders had said, but Harry glanced suspiciously at his madly flicking ears and considered that the riders’ message might have started life as something else. Then he shook his head. If he went around distrusting Nuisance, then he might as well ask the mummidade to reestablish the communication bond through Westshadow.

            “Then when the storms come, I’ll be ready to turn them around,” Harry said. “I’ll protect the meadow from any threat. It doesn’t matter whether there’s one storm in a day or three.”

            Nuisance shuddered. “I hope there aren’t three. I’ve only seen one storm from a distance, and I have no desire to experience them closer at hand.” He turned his head back towards the three riders, including Open Wings, sitting on their beasts a short distance away, and chirped and squawked in response, trilling and whistling his way through the scale of their language.

            Harry leaned back against the side of the great silver house Andromeda had built, the one big enough to shelter everyone in the meadow, and sighed. The riders didn’t distrust him any longer, he thought; they had seen him conjure and control enough storms by now to accept the mastery of them as part of his wild magic. But they seemed to have enough bad experiences with summer that they couldn’t keep from coming to ask questions, niggling little ones that nevertheless chipped at Harry’s temper and certainty.

            Well. In the end, it was only about five or ten minutes out of Harry’s day, and now that Nuisance was here, it was much easier to answer them.

            This time, Open Wings and the riders had no more questions after this last one. They clenched their hands near their chests and held them out to Harry, a gesture of thanks that he had learned and could return. He tilted his head back and watched them take to the skies on their beasts, wings sweeping down a hard enough wind to flatten the grass in the immediate vicinity.

            When he looked back at Nuisance, he found him shifting from paw to paw. Harry raised an eyebrow and reached out to scratch Nuisance near the antlers. He thought it was probably dreams and memories of his Patronus that had given Nuisance that particular feature, and the kires leaned towards and into his touch willingly enough. “What is it?”

            “I wonder sometimes,” Nuisance said, and made a swift prancing motion, like one of the steps that he used when he carried Victoire and Teddy on his back. “Was I only formed by the wild magic to be a tool that other species could use to communicate?”

            Harry blinked, not expecting the question. Nuisance seemed content to leave his origins a mystery, no matter how much Hermione wanted to know more. “Bodiless and the wild magic didn’t mean you to do that,” he said slowly. “And if you hadn’t met us, you wouldn’t be doing that. Maybe you would have gone south and found Primrose and the thunderrin, and they can communicate with each other just fine, so you would have done something else.”

            “Yes, but.” Nuisance danced sideways, his shaggy fur swaying along with him. His eyes were completely green now, Harry’s color, and wide. “It just seems like it’s too great a coincidence that I can understand all of you and that I found my way here. Did the wild magic make me for this? Am I just a tool?”

            His voice soared at the end, and Harry looked uneasily towards the part of the meadow where Victoire and Teddy were taking a nap, with Draco to watch them. He knew it was a great step forwards for Bill to let Draco watch his daughter, and Harry didn’t want to do anything to wake the kids up, or to give Bill material to use against Draco.

            “I don’t think the wild magic made you for anything,” Harry said, and nibbled his lip a little when Nuisance stared desolately at him. He didn’t seem much comforted by Harry’s statement, and Harry couldn’t blame him. “I mean—you want to know what I think? Even though I have no way of proving it, of course, and both Draco and Hermione think other theories are more likely.”

            Other theories are always more likely than what you think, Draco’s voice said down the bond.

            Arse, Harry retorted cheerfully, and waited until Nuisance straightened up a little and said, “Yes, I’d like to know.”

            “I think your creation was purely accidental,” Harry said softly. “Just like the wild magic that comes to most of the humans on Hurricane is purely accidental, and it comes from whatever is important to them at that moment in time. Draco wanted to defend me from a bird, and so he got the power to cut things off. It doesn’t mean that he desired weapons more than anything else in the world for most of his life, just for that one second. It’s been useful to him, but it was blind chance. I think that the wild magic created you in the same way, impulse and blind wonder, and what you become is always going to be dependent on the people you surround yourself with. If you’re tired of being with us, you only have to leave, and then you can be something else. If you’re with people who have new thoughts, you’ll be new.”

            Nuisance blinked several times. Draco was murmuring savagely in the back of Harry’s mind about undermining people’s self-confidence and how he never wanted Harry advising their future children, but Harry ignored him. He thought this might be what Nuisance needed right now, at least if he was afraid of having some kind of destiny.

            “Free,” Nuisance said. “Just like anyone else.”

            Harry smiled at him. “Even more than anyone else. Other people carry parts of themselves around wherever they go. But if you don’t like part of yourself, associate with people who have different ideas, and you’ll be different.”

            Nuisance lifted his head to the wind and sniffed a little, nostrils wriggling open and ears flicking enthusiastically. Then he glanced at Harry and lifted his lips slightly above his teeth, a laugh and a smile at the same time. “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve given me a lot to think about.” And he bounced away over the grass.

            Maybe I’ll think about you being an adviser to our future children after all, Draco said.

            Harry smiled at the sky and said, Do you want to practice the mummidade dance again, after Teddy and Victoire wake up?

            Draco’s response was wordless, but as crashingly enthusiastic as a sea-wave, and Harry continued to smile as he went back to herding duty.

*

            Draco twisted in mid-air, and then swore as he came down and found that Harry had dodged to the right instead. He tugged on his hair and glared at Harry. “How can we make so many mistakes when we’re bonded?” he whined.

            Harry smiled tolerantly at him. Draco knew, and resented, that it was tolerant, and glared. Harry came a step towards him and took his hand.

            “Because we’re not one person, like the mummidade,” he murmured. “We’re not that deep into our bond. We can’t anticipate the next move that we make before we make it, or all the little obstacles that might cause us to stumble.”

            “Then we have to go deeper into the bond, and you think we can do it?” Draco asked, seizing the trailing end of that idea.

            Harry hesitated. Draco sneered. You only said that to make me feel better. You never intended to do anything about it, did you?

            I didn’t say that, Harry objected. I just don’t see how we can get deeper into our bond than we are now.

            Let me try something. Draco stepped towards Harry, who blinked at him a few times and then nodded.

            Draco knew that Harry would put up with anything that Draco wanted to do, and only ask him to stop if it was actively painful—maybe not even then, considering his tolerance for pain. But Draco wanted to do something that would be wanted, that would help Harry to achieve something they both desired.

            He ran his fingers gently up and down Harry’s cheeks, staring into his eyes. He could feel the connection that always bound them hammering away like a separate pulse in the air between them, and he could feel the progress of Harry’s thoughts, whirling around with worry and frustration, slow. Soon Harry was breathing in tune with Draco, not looking away from him even when Draco reached up and took Harry’s earlobe between two fingers.

            I want to try something, Draco said, making his mental voice sound as much like his physical one as he could.

            I already agreed to let you do whatever you wanted. Harry blinked again, and Draco could sense him starting to surface from the involuntary trance that Draco’s staring had cast him into.

            Draco shook his head, but slowly, as though he was underwater, so that he wouldn’t appear hasty and ruin the effect he was trying to build. Let me, he said, and Harry relaxed a little, swallowing. His blinking ceased, and his gaze remained on Draco’s face, where it belonged.

            Draco didn’t need to take a deep breath, but he did. There was no physical equivalent of the mental work he was about to do, not really. But it made him feel better, and his hands were steady as he moved them back down to Harry’s shoulders.

            Then he plunged beneath the surface of the bond.

            He had never tried to go so deep before. He and Harry were linked in mind and heart and what felt like soul, but Draco had always maintained his own separate personality, and so had Harry. They didn’t mingle to become one new person like the mummidade did, which was probably why their communication with the mummidade remained so imperfect until Nuisance came along.

            But now, Draco tried to break down the barriers, striving and slipping through whatever confronted him. He ventured behind walls in Harry’s mind that he would never have thought were still there, given everything they had shared. But new, private memories tumbled past him, and Draco could have learned, if he’d lingered, how frightened Harry had been during the war and the jealous thoughts he’d had about his friends when they got together and how intensely he had longed to kill every reporter who bothered Teddy.

            Harry started and shied then. He was probably remembering—no, he was remembering, Draco could say that with certainty, feeling the memories scrape past him—how Draco had treated him after he watched Harry torture a former Death Eater who had also come to Hurricane.

            Draco sent out tendrils of calm, and continued to swim deeper. He didn’t feel the process in the same way, since he was used to his own feelings and memories, but he knew that he was inviting Harry into his own mind, too, freely flinging open the doors and giving up the secrets that he had retained until now. He could only hope that Harry would avail himself of that invitation rather than stay in his own body and panic.

            It seemed Harry had. He clung shivering to the side of Draco’s mind for so long that it hurt, and then he flung himself forwards and vanished into the new pool.

            And Draco felt the last barriers between them blur and run like wet paint. He was Harry and Harry was him. Draco blinked open eyes that didn’t see as well as his own, and turned a head that felt heavier than his, and at the same time knew it was his, because he had always worn this body like a cloak.

            He had two bodies. He practiced for a few moments, walking up and down, learning the different sense of balance that his new body had, and learning the differences in his own at the same time. Because they were there, blended, both of them, the knowledge that both of them harbored running into their minds, flowing and lapping like water against the sides of a basin, and Draco could find what he wanted if he reached out—

            They were they. They were he.

            And he turned around and lifted two sets of hands, and two kinds of wild magic dazzled around him, the power to cut and the power to call winds.

            He knew where the storms were, how they would come down from the north. He knew the lightning that rode with them, the rain, and how he would locate a pulse of power in the center of a storm and pull it apart.

            He knew how to chop grasses off at the base and weed the gardens in a rhythm. He knew how to shred a living bird through his claws as if they were a meat grinder—he knew what a meat grinder was, that Muggle machine—and he had never done that before. He had done it before. Memory splashed and foamed, and became part of the larger sea without losing anything. He was no longer a series of separate rivers, and he never wanted to be.

            He knew that he could complete the dance the mummidade had told him about. How could his two bodies move in anything other than absolute harmony?

            He turned and faced his other body, commanded his eyes to see each other. He smiled at what he saw, with two pairs of lips. Grey eyes were fascinating from the outside, and so were green, that true and rare color of green that he had seen so rarely since they came to Hurricane, where most of the grass was gold.

            But that color was in the meadow, and it was in the foam of the sea.

            He held up his arms, and his bodies whirled around and faced each other. For a moment, the air between them quivered as if it was made of glass. He wondered if it would fall to shards if he reached out and touched it.

            But it was so thick, it was so wonderful. He could move through that glass air, and he did, into a dance that glided as if skating on crystal.

            When he had to bow his heads, he could. When he smiled, he could. When he felt the magic of the dance begin to move through him, echoing the image that the mummidade had given him, he only smiled wider.

            Then the mummidade were dancing around him.

            One with two bodies and one with three and one with four, they leaped and pranced, keeping the time. He turned to all three of them, looking into their eyes at different times, and felt pouring, gliding joy. They had thought for so long that no humans were capable of this, and that they would never learn the dance and have to go on having children in their way that involved blood and the tearing of flesh.

            It was no effort to understand them, not like this, not when his minds glowed and twined together and he could remember his mother teaching him to read and Hermione giving him one of the first hugs of his life.

            Then the magic began to play more seriously in the center of his bodies, and he had to turn his attention away from the mummidade, much as he longed to communicate with them. Creating his child would take all his attention for the next few moments.

            Or the next few hours? Well, it did not matter. The time was the same as his movements, skating and sliding around him, twining the gentle patterns into the hyaline surface of the world.

            He danced, and there was the stamp of grass beneath his feet and the arch of the sky overhead in his eyes and the taste of the wind in his magic. He understood, now, why the mummidade had despaired so much when his two bodies were not in concert.

            What the mummidade wove in this dance was more than magic, and more than just coordination, which was what one of him had thought before. Just handle it well enough, had gone his unpaired thought, and the magic would have to come down, especially when both of him had powerful wild gifts already.

            But that wasn’t the way it worked. What they were weaving here between him, while the ground and the magic and the sky and the breezes from the sea sang steadily with him, was the world.

            Hurricane was with him, in every word and gesture. There were the colors, yes, but also the smells, the faint and sweet smells of the grasses, the delicate perfumes of the meat that he had learned to eat since he came to the meadow, a dust that reminded him of his cupboard under the stairs, a cold grace from the sea that reminded him of Malfoy Manor. Memories dashed through him, funneled downstream and around in circles, and he swam through them, touching them and creating from them what he wanted and needed.

            His child would have to have a mind. His memories were for that. But he would also need a body. He chose one, weaving flesh from imagination and dreams.

            What color hair? What color eyes? Those were secondary considerations for a mummid child, which would always have white fur and golden eyes, but they were important to him, if only for a fleeting moment here and there, and he had fun choosing them.

            Because that was what was important here. One should always have fun, always understand and delight and gather the delight and spin it out in new directions. Trying to be serious on Hurricane all the time was for people like the riders, who always thought about the future. He needed to think about the present.

            The present was the dance.

            The glassy air expanded around him and the dancing mummidade, who had come back, all whirling three of them, and then narrowed to a point in the center of the circle. He understood. The magic would come to fruit there, to a birth, in one way or another. He had only a rudimentary understanding of exactly how it happened; already his mind was contracting with the magic, concentrating on and into the birth of his child, not soaring with the sky and the breezes the way that it had when he was weaving the world.

            He would have mourned that if he could, but he wasn’t capable of it. Instead, he plunged into that concentration as he had plunged into the joy a few moments before. Or a few hours before. Time had faded to another tracery on the glass.

            The air around him rippled and shone, and then rang so hard that he gasped. He knew that magic was coming for him, and that it would make conduits of his bones. He spread the arms of both bodies and tossed back his heads, so that the magic would stream out of his hair and connect him with the earth.

            The dance was still alive around him, if only in the way that his bodies bowed towards the earth, but it had become all eddying, focused power now, like a beam of sunlight shooting through a prism, and not wild movement. The mummidade were the ones who danced, who leaped, who spun, and their movements were part of the celebration, not the creation.

            Not this pool of magic that stretched and billowed in front of him, and which he could hear singing.

            The song was faint at first, distant. But it rose as rapidly as a note of howling wind, and then came close and slammed into his ears. He found himself throwing his arms up defensively before he thought about it.

            So the defensiveness entered the wind and danced with it, and wove a darker thread for the tapestry. His child would have a slight fear of wind, and would have some growing to do to be rid of it. He accepted that as the price of losing some concentration on the perfect vision of the child.

            Perhaps nothing was meant to be perfect. Weaving Hurricane into his child might have guaranteed that. After all, Hurricane wasn’t a perfect world. But it meant his child would be at home here, and that was what he had asked for. What he desired. What he desired more than anything in the world.

            There was a slight tremble in his own mind, a question about what he really wanted and honored in forming his child. He didn’t allow it to disturb his surface serenity, though. His child might fear the wind, but he was master of the wind. Had he not created a storm and banished it again? Had he not promised that he could protect the meadow against any storms that would come? This was the dance that formed his son, but he was a separate being from his son.

            His son. His child.

            The silence in the center of the dance, the rough circle defined by the wild magic and more loosely by the mummidade that had chosen to prance with him, abruptly broke apart. A great bubble arose. He shaded his eyes from the colors that wheeled in it, not because he feared them, but because of the great brightness.

            That was another difference between his son and him. He had come from his mother’s womb, and accepted that he was meant to be born that way. On Earth, there had been no other choice. But his son was born from magic, and he would have his own personality. So many of his father’s dreams were danced into him, and those dreams had contradictions, along with some of his desires. He wanted his child to be fearless, but he had put in that defensiveness about the wind, for example.

            That was all right. What he wanted was a living child, not a perfect one.

            The mummidade sped up their dance, the blowing of wind in the grass and the golden light cracking around them, and he felt, from them, that that was the way it should be. Their children were born imperfect, not really people until they bonded with someone else. So his child would be born imperfect, but in a different way. Feeling him like this, moving with him, the mummidade understood more about humans than ever before. They could accept that it was different for humans, that even the process of bonding was different, and that that was all right.

            He kicked his legs up one more time and dropped his bodies into a kneeling position in front of his bubble.

            The bubble that dropped back to the meadow’s grass and blazed green for one second, black for one second, and then became glassy. Then it vanished, and his son lay there, kicking his legs and wailing loudly enough to bring winds down from the sky, coiling over his skin, trying to protect him.

            His winds. Their winds. Harry’s winds.

            The separation from each other was so painful that Draco wanted to tear his mind out of his head. But he had an instinct stronger than that, and that was to respond to the cries of their son. So he hurried across the grass and picked up the baby.

            Wailing, the baby raised blue-grey eyes to him. Maybe they would change to pure grey in time. Draco had no way of knowing. Wispy dark hair clung to his head. Maybe it would fall out and change to some different color. Harry had no way of knowing.

            Harry reached past him, and put his hand in the center of their baby’s forehead.

            He’ll never bear a scar, Harry thought, and then the moment between them burst as other people rushed down the meadow to them, some riders afoot, Granger and Weasley rushing, and dancing mummidade.

            Draco closed his eyes and nestled his cheek against the baby’s forehead. He had no idea what they would name him yet.

            He knew that their child was here, and that was enough.

*

            Sasunarufan13: Thanks! But yes, other creatures could come, and they might be more dangerous, or more powerful.

            SP777: It’s going to depend a lot on how many people bond to other people. Bonds outside of marriages, if they’re sexual, could be a problem.
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Here to Live and Die