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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 Fourteen—Wildborn

            “I don’t know how normal parents do it.”

            Harry just grunted and scooped Jeremy up, holding him close for a second while he murmured to him. He cried all the time, a quality that Draco had been quick to say Harry must have woven into him during their dance, because Draco had been a perfect baby who never gave his parents a moment’s anxiety. And of course Draco woke up when Harry did, because of the bond pulling at both of them.

            “We are normal parents, by the way,” Harry muttered as he held Jeremy close enough that his winds could bring one of the bottles Fleur and Bill had used for Victoire. Lucky that some of them were here, Harry reckoned, and that the riders knew of grasses that, brewed and heated and broken down, made an acceptable substitute for milk when their antelope calves needed it. At least Jeremy seemed to be gaining weight and didn’t cry when he drank the grass-milk, and that was the best they could hope for. “I don’t want Jeremy growing up thinking he’s not a normal child.”

            “He’s not.”

            Harry jerked his head up, betrayed, but Draco was looking at him with the kind of clear steadiness that always made Harry want to calm down and listen, so he did. But he held Jeremy closer to him, more in the crook of his arm, and fed him with more milk as he did so.

            “He’s different,” said Draco. “Better. Special. The first human child to be born on Hurricane in the way that Hurricane births children.”

            “Not all children,” Harry had to say. “The riders hatch from eggs.”

            Draco leaned closer. “I’m trying to have a grand moment here,” he said. “And tell you why I think the rest of them will never think Jeremy is normal, and why that’s a good thing. Shut up, if you please.”

            Harry rolled his eyes, but despite himself, he was grinning. He obediently shut up while Draco drew himself up and stared into the distance with misty eyes.

            “They won’t let him forget where he came from,” Draco said quietly. “So I don’t think we should, either. Instead, let’s acknowledge that we’re strange, that this is strange, that the whole thing is full of aspects no human ever had to consider before. And let’s make that our triumph and teach Jeremy to be proud of what he is, instead of ashamed and hiding it, and trying to pretend that he’s exactly the same as Victoire or Teddy.”

            Harry wrinkled his nose, waited a bit, and then asked, “Is your grand moment over now?”

            “More or less,” Draco said, looking down at him and hopping from the bed to stand beside Harry. “Why?”

            “Because the wonderful, special child that we both share needs a new nappy,” Harry said, and handed Jeremy off to him.

*

            For one of the few times in his life that he could remember, Draco was simply happy.

            It wasn’t that it was always easy. Jeremy was fussy, rarely slept more than forty minutes at a time, and tended to scream in a way that set Draco’s teeth on edge. The grass-milk was, the way that Fleur and Andromeda talked about it, a poor substitute for the real thing. Most of the rest of the humans were either still puzzled out of their skulls—like Weasley—trying to quantify things—like Granger—or interested in Jeremy but wary of him at the same time—the rest of them.

            He and Harry had even argued about names. Draco had assumed without thinking about it that his son, because he had been the one who wanted children more fiercely than Harry, should have a star name, or a Roman one. But Harry had wanted to call him James.

            Draco refused on the grounds that this would give him a complex, and suggested Scorpius instead.

            Harry had refused that on the grounds that it would sound stupid.

            Draco was still stinging from that refusal when Harry said that it would be all right if the name began with the same letter as James, but that Draco wasn’t to take that as permission to call him Julius.

            Draco had eventually agreed on Jeremy. Eventually. It had taken a few days of him and Harry calling the child different names aloud and shouting even more back and forth at each other in the bond.

            So rational experience argued that Draco should be steaming like he’d drunk Pepper-Up Potion by now. Harry was being unreasonable. Other people circled around them as if they had done something frightening instead of wondrous. They were both short on sleep.

            Instead, Draco found a whole new thing to appreciate every time he held Jeremy. The clear color of his eyes, which were still blue but which Draco was certain edged closer to grey with every evening. The way he stretched his hands out towards the winds and laughed with a crazy edge of delight to the sound when they skittered around him; that might mean Draco hadn’t done him harm after all, dancing his own fear of wind into the child. The way Jeremy had already learned to focus on faces and smile, although he did that so rarely it was a miracle each time it happened, and Harry and Draco kept exchanging memories of it.

            And then there was the way the mummidade had taken to him.

            Maybe because they had danced the dance that created Jeremy with Harry and Draco, or because this was the way their own children were born, or even because they were convinced that Jeremy couldn’t be a whole person without real people, two or more, nearby, the mummidade wanted to be with Jeremy all the time. They grazed or lay nearby with their legs folded as Harry and Draco fed Jeremy. They let him lie on their flanks and nudged him with all two or three of their heads, depending on how many bodies made up that one individual. They danced around him at the slightest flick of wind, tossing their hooves and horns with what Nuisance said was pure joy.

            Nuisance liked Jeremy, too. He said, when Draco questioned him about it, “I was born of wind or magic or something else I’m not even sure of. Compared to me, he isn’t strange at all.”

            Draco had to admit that made sense, although he slightly resented hearing that his son was serving as a standard of comparison for someone else on Hurricane, even someone who was as harmless as Nuisance seemed. For now, anyway.

            Our son, Harry’s voice had said in his head then.

            Draco also had to admit that he had some trouble with that. He thought of Jeremy as his son a lot of the time, tracing the shape of Black and Malfoy ancestors in his face, or trying to, since Jeremy’s features often seemed to change day by day. And he didn’t think of the equal part Harry had had in the dance and Jeremy’s creation nearly as often as he should.

            But he was getting better at that, he thought, the day he took Jeremy in his arms and he and Harry went out to show him to Open Wings for the first time.

*

            Open Wings had gone south on a scouting mission, or so Nuisance had told Harry. What they had gone for, Nuisance pawed the earth and hummed over, but he wouldn’t say.

            It worried Harry, a little, but then, a lot of things seemed to worry him at the moment, most of them related to Jeremy. If Open Wings wanted to have secrets, there wasn’t much he could do about it except wait, and trust that Open Wings would tell them in time.

            The riders landed their beasts on the grass a few meters away from one of the antelope herds that Harry had been watching. Harry, who was walking in front of Draco and Jeremy, quickened his pace, and then stopped. He didn’t see Swoop in the midst of them, which meant that Open Wings wasn’t here yet.

            Then a shadow swept across his face, across all of them, and he looked up in time to see the great wings dip down.

            Swoop landed shaking his head slightly. Harry stared. The feathers around his face had grown in white and grey, a phenomenon Harry hadn’t seen before. On the other hand, they’d barely been on Hurricane for one season yet. Maybe it was something that happened naturally for all the beasts in the summer.

            When he looked at the others, though, there was no smattering of white or grey on any of them. Harry turned back in time to see Open Wings spring off Swoop and stand beside him, hand on his partner’s neck, the way he had often stood before.

            But Harry knew it wasn’t his imagination that Open Wings leaned on Swoop more heavily than usual, or that a few of the claws from the ends of his talons were missing.

            “What happened?” Harry demanded. Then he winced. Nuisance was further away, talking to the antelopes, whom he thought he should be able to communicate with even though they lacked the “underlayer” to their thoughts that Nuisance had described as only belonging to intelligent species. Open Wings still didn’t understand more than a few English words, the way Harry didn’t understand more than a few riders’ whistles.

            Open Wings spread his talons, a weary gesture, and then lifted his hand and called out in a piercing trill. Nuisance’s head came up, and he crouched to the ground, then sprang over the antelopes and landed next to them, antlers cocked. His ears oriented on Open Wings and he stared for a second, then spun around and snorted at Harry in agitation.

            “He says to tell you that it was the ones you call the thunderrin that did this to him and his partner. And the one called Primrose.”

            Harry hissed out. Shit. Just when he’d thought that he might be able to worry about the storms and their child and not much else, this had to happen.

            But that had been the way it always was. When he had wanted to be left alone to raise Teddy, then the reporters had crowded in, and the Ministry’s persecutions of his friends had started. Life was always there all around you, happening all the time, and it never asked if you wanted to be a part of it.

            Teddy. Teddy hadn’t been much interested in Jeremy yet, but then, he was tiny. Harry was not looking forward to the days when Teddy decided that he wanted more of Harry’s attention.

            You’ll have a heart big enough for both of them, Draco said casually. Harry looked over his shoulder to watch him bouncing Jeremy. He hadn’t needed either Fleur or Andromeda to show him how to do that, although they’d both offered. If I do, as selfish as I am and without the reasons that you have to love Teddy, then you do.

            Harry relaxed and smiled at him, then turned back to Nuisance and Open Wings. “How did it happen?” he asked Open Wings softly.

            Open Wings chattered and whistled again, and Nuisance listened intently, then crooned back. It seemed to be a request for more information, because Open Wings fluttered the feathers around his beak with his sigh before he repeated himself.

            “He says,” Nuisance said, turning to face Harry and crouching as if he thought he might be required to jump over antelopes again, “that it happened because he was careless. The thunderrin showed no sign of noticing his people as they got close. So he tried to spy on one that went off alone to train with its rider. And that one was Primrose, and she seems to have a closer bond to her thunderrin than most of the rest. She sensed him and Swoop, and she unleashed magic at them.”

            “Wild magic?” Harry asked. If Primrose had that, in addition to her bond to her thunderrin, they needed to know what it was.

            Nuisance shook his antlers. “It seemed to be magic composed of both her power and the thunderrin’s. It burned them.”

            Harry stepped up and hesitated a little. “Could you ask him if it’s okay for me to look closely at the burns?”

            Nuisance turned and clicked and crooned at Open Wings again, hopping up and down and whirling his tail around. Harry wasn’t sure how his tail helped him to communicate with the riders, but it seemed to work; Open Wings glanced at Harry, spread his talon-fingers, and pushed back a few of his feathers.

            Harry stepped up and gently bent his head, letting his winds push back more feathers when Open Wings tilted his beak back. Harry narrowed his eyes as he examined them. He could see why Nuisance had called them burns. They had probably felt like that, and they’d left black marks that resembled them.

            But one brush of his winds against the marks told Harry they weren’t that. His winds had felt burns by now; more than once, someone had got careless near the fire, and Harry’s airs could cool and soothe someone better than most of the limited potions Angelina had brought with them or could brew. This was painful, and buried, not leading down from the surface of the skin the way a severe burn would. Unless the riders were different from humans in that, as well, but Harry didn’t think they were.

            Harry stretched out a hand. A wind came and curled in his palm, stirring his hair and the feathers on Swoop’s neck.

            This time, Harry didn’t need Nuisance to ask for permission. Open Wings met his eyes and gave a resigned flutter of his fingers.

            Harry leaned in and exhaled, drawing the wind in his palm into his lungs, then let it out again, hard, on the black marks on Open Wings’s face.

            The wind swept down and around and in. Only the way Open Wings stiffened, his hands flaring open, showed how startled he was. Harry rode the wind, the way he did when asking it to seek out a conversation and report back to him. Its perceptions mingled with his, and he felt the sensation of something trapped beneath the surface of Open Wings’s feathers. He extended a hand, unaware, really, if he was doing it physically or stretching out fingers that were made of air, and yanked.

            Open Wings screeched; Swoop swung around with his beak open and poised to strike; Draco shouted in the back of his mind; and Harry leaped back with his hand full of something. Something fluffy and struggling and cracking.

            Drop it.

            Draco’s voice drove into his brain, and it wasn’t an order Harry could resist. He opened his fingers. The struggling thing fell to the soil, and immediately tried to dig itself in.

            Harry’s winds wouldn’t allow that, however. They scooped it up a mere second before Nuisance tried to stamp on it with one paw.

            They crowded around it. Nuisance was sniffing, his ears tucked against the sides of his head and his eyes almost entirely green. Draco stood back with Jeremy’s face held to the side of his neck, as though he assumed whatever they were witnessing would corrupt Jeremy if it got the chance. Harry couldn’t really disagree with that.

            The thing didn’t make any more sense when they looked at it closely, though. It was as black as the dirt of the meadow or a stone from the mountains or Open Wings’s feathers, which Harry thought was another reason that it had gone in unnoticed. The surface was soft and rippled, and things moved in and out of it. The only thing Harry could think to compare it to was some of the Muggle machines that he had seen in snatched glimpses of science fiction movies on the telly.

            Then Draco said, It’s a seed. And repeated it aloud, just in case anyone else needed that particular horrifying revelation.

            Harry’s winds jerked, but caught the thing before it could fall. Open Wings, though he took a moment to react because he needed Nuisance to say the same thing in his language, arched his shoulders and cawed with revulsion. Harry didn’t know if there were any words in there, but he would remember the sound.

            Nuisance crowded forwards, but kept his muzzle at the level of Harry’s shoulder, above and behind the seed. “What is it a seed from, though?” he whispered, and then swung his head to look at Draco. “How did you know what it was?”

            Harry turned to Draco. Draco’s eyes were horrified, but his mind clear and his hands on Jeremy’s head and neck gentle and strong. “Because I’ve seen a seed from one of my mother’s gardens do the same thing, with magic cast on it to speed up its growth,” he said quietly. “Those were tendrils spreading out, trying to root and find something to grow on.” He turned to Open Wings. “But I think that, since it was in your flesh, it wasn’t seeking to grow in the soil.”

            “He says you must be right,” Nuisance said, when he had translated that and got Open Wings’s reply. He turned back to the seed again, mouth slightly open, and Harry thought he knew why. This was an enemy, but it was also a new creation of the wild magic, like him, the only new one since Jeremy. “And he says he wants the other ones out right now.”

            Luckily, since there were those black and painful places above each seed, Harry didn’t take long to find them and yank them out with his winds. He did the same thing to Swoop, once Open Wings had got his beast to lie down and keep still while Harry did the work. Swoop snapped at Harry more than once, but finally laid his head down and closed his eyes, and seemed to shake himself all over when the last seed was out.

            Harry set the seeds to orbiting in midair, well away from each other, in case the tendrils could get a grip when joined and grow into something even more awful and strong. He watched them dancing, fuzzy, writhing black nests of destruction. Swoop hissed at them and then spread his wings and ran, leaping into the air. It was only the second or third time Harry had seen him fly without his rider.

            Open Wings said, through Nuisance, “I do not know what they were meant to grow. Do you?”

            Harry shook his head and turned to Draco. Draco seemed to have decided that he’d made enough horrifying revelations for the evening, though. He cradled Jeremy and hummed, and Jeremy chose that moment to wail.

            Open Wings jerked once, then turned and glanced at Jeremy. He bowed and spread his fingers. “Congratulations,” he said, one of the riders’ words Harry had learned to recognize, before he turned and walked after Swoop.

            “Doesn’t he want to know?” Harry asked Nuisance.

            “He’s had enough for right now.” Nuisance was all but dancing from foot to foot, his attention still locked on the seeds. “But I haven’t! What do you think they are? What do you think they grow?”

            “I think they grow new thunderrin,” Harry said. “Either that, or some other kind of creature that disables their enemies. But thunderrin is the likely guess. It would be something that needed the flesh and blood of enemies, and I don’t think the thunderrin would waste that on a lesser kind of creature.”

            “That might be right, but it’s the most disgusting thing I’ve heard since we came to Hurricane,” Draco said, plaintively. “Can we go back home now? Jeremy’s hungry, and I probably will be once I have a chance to recover my appetite.”

            “We need to decide what to do with the—seeds first,” Harry said, and turned to them. “I want to keep at least one so Hermione can study it, but I think we should destroy the others. And then find a way to keep this one safe.”

            “Do what you want,” Draco said, and walked away. Harry could feel the steady glow of the bond between them, and that was the only thing that kept him from resenting Draco leaving so easily. On the other hand, he had Jeremy, and Harry could agree that their son needed to be far away from these things right now.

            “I might have ideas.” Nuisance had danced closer again, and his head was tilted to the side, antlers nearly brushing Harry’s cheek.

            “How?” Harry asked.

            Nuisance flicked out an ear and said, “Hush. I’m listening.”

            Harry blinked and fell silent. Listening to the seeds? But maybe they were more like eggs, if they were meant to grow into young thunderrin, and Harry had to admit that Nuisance had always had a gift at picking up thoughts around him. Maybe even the thoughts of the unborn. It wasn’t like he’d had a chance to practice; as far as Harry knew, he’d never been near a rider’s nest, and the mummidade didn’t produce children by pregnancy.

            Then Nuisance started back and said, “Kill them. Burn them. That’ll get rid of them. Fire will. Get rid of them. All of them.” He was starting and shivering, his eyes standing out in his head. When he turned to Harry, the green had left them and they were all black, the color of the seeds. “You have to kill them.”

            “Why?” Harry asked, although he used his winds to move the seeds further apart from each other.

            “Because they’re hungry,” Nuisance said. “All they are is hunger. They want something to dig into and feed on. That’s all they are. Desire. It’s even worse than the Tssisid’s desire to fly to the south. At least that was something I could understand. This wants to destroy everything that’s in the way.”

            Harry could no longer conjure fire in the normal way, but he told his winds to spin the seeds, faster and faster. They were going at such a speed, finally, that trying to follow them with his human perceptions made him dizzy, and then he gasped as the air friction set them afire.

            The fire ate inwards and outwards, both; Harry hadn’t realized that his winds had worked beneath the surface of the seeds. Tendrils fractured, and Harry did think he heard a faint scream. He dismissed that. He wouldn’t think of it right now. He turned to Nuisance as fluffy dark ash drifted down around them, right before a passing breeze seized and scattered it. “Can you hear any more of their minds?” he asked.

            Nuisance listened, his eyes closed in concentration, his four feet all stamping alternately. Then he opened his eyes again and shook his head. “No. I think you did it.” And he turned around and bounced off in the direction of what Harry knew was the largest pool in the meadow. Harry wasn’t surprised he needed a bath, after rolling his thoughts through that hunger.

            Harry shuddered and headed back to the tent, himself. He might take a bath later. For now, what would cleanse him and comfort him and protect him from thoughts of the future was the presence of Draco and Jeremy.

*

            Sasunarufan13: So far, he doesn’t seem all that different. But those differences will probably be visible as he grows older.

            SP777: Harry’s younger self would probably try to lock the older Harry up in St. Mungo’s for his own good.

            And thank you! I had good feelings about that chapter.
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Here to Live and Die