Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

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.

Chapter List
- 14
- 15
- 16
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Fifteen—Seeds of Destruction
            “What are we here to talk about?”
            Harry sighed and looked around the circle of humans—well, they were all humans except Nuisance and Open Wings, who stood beside Nuisance, his talons resting on his face so he could touch the places where Harry had pulled the seeds out. And Draco and Jeremy weren’t here. Draco had wanted to stay in the tent and take care of Jeremy, and though Harry suspected that was at least partially because he didn’t want to talk to the Weasleys, it was agreeable to him. This might go more smoothly if Draco wasn’t here.
            “Primrose used a new weapon when the riders went south to investigate the thunderrin,” he said. “They thought it was fire at first, or some kind of wild magic. But I pulled these seeds from Open Wings’s feathers, and from his beast.” He nodded, and since that was a prearranged signal, Nuisance didn’t need to translate. Open Wings stood forth, turning so that everyone could make out the faint white marks on his dark feathers. “We didn’t know what they were at first. Then they started trying to grow, and Nuisance said that he could feel a hunger in them.”
            “They had the hunger,” Nuisance said, and kicked with his back feet and bobbed his head down at the same time. Bill and Angelina, who were seated on either side of where he was standing, moved a bit further away. “I could feel it. They wanted to devour everything in the world that might aid them in growing.” He shuddered. “And they needed living flesh. They couldn’t just grow in the ground.”
            “What should we do about it?” That was Bill, leaning forwards to peer into Harry’s face as if he would have the answer. At least it was a lot better than the reaction he would have had before this.
            “I think we should get ready for an attack by Primrose and the thunderrin,” Harry said. He grimaced at the expressions that appeared on some faces then, but if anyone had a better plan, he hadn’t heard it yet. “I can call a storm at a minute’s notice, but that doesn’t help much if everyone else is out in the open when the thunderrin come wheeling up. What other ideas do you have that could help?”
            Nuisance had been clucking and chirping to Open Wings, and now he turned around and said, “He suggests a scout relay. Riders stationed at different points all across the southern plains, ready to fly north if any thunderrin show up.”
            Harry nodded. He had discussed the idea a bit with Open Wings last night, but it was good to have it opened up here, for discussion in front of everyone.
            “Does anyone else have suggestions?” he asked, turning around and catching people’s eyes.
            Ron cleared his throat. “I think—I think I can still Apparate. I just haven’t wanted to try it because it’s so easy to get lost on Hurricane, with so many things looking the same.”
            Harry nodded encouragingly to him. He thought he knew what Ron was saying, but he wanted it out in the open so everyone could take it in or argue about it.
            “I think I could Apparate out to any place where the thunderrin are crossing over and try exerting that—talent I have.” Ron still didn’t want to refer to his ability to get rid of wild magic as wild magic. “If they’re using magic to fly, maybe I can make them fall. And I can get rid of any weapons they’re using that might rely on the wild magic.”
            Hermione nodded approvingly at him. “I can try Apparating south for a while and seeing if I can sense the concentrations of thunderrin magic,” she offered.
            Other people began to speak up then, some volunteering for guard duty and Angelina talking about making potions that would allow her to Heal anyone who did get the seeds in them, and Harry relaxed. This was a much better position than he had thought he would find himself in a month ago. He wasn’t being forced to be a leader this time. The others could learn.
            I still didn’t want to talk to them, Draco’s sleepy voice snarled down the back of the bond.
            Harry grinned and lifted his head. The sun overhead blazed steadily, and no one would ever have thought Hurricane was a planet of violent storms at the moment. I know you wanted to catch up on your sleep, he said cheerfully. That’s not the sort of thing you can really hide from me.
            Draco’s response wasn’t in words. Harry chuckled, and then settled down and went back to talking seriously about the problem with the thunderrin’s seeds as everyone stared at him.
            It was good to be reminded, at times, that not everything was about day-to-day survival.
*
            Draco sat back on the grass and shook his head. Technically, he was keeping an eye on the new antelope just added to the herd, which the riders had brought back from a wild one and which needed to spend more time around all the sentient creatures in the meadow to tame them.
            Really, he was watching Jeremy, who lay on his back in the middle of a little hollow of grass and waved his hands and gurgled at the mummidade dancing around them.
            Draco didn’t think it was his imagination that Jeremy had already learned to look at more than one mummid when they came up to him, to pick out whether it was two bodies that made up that individual, or three, or four. The mummidade seemed to have got over their fear that Jeremy wasn’t a real person because he only had one body, too. They bowed their heads and brushed their horns against him, and kicked up their heels and spun, and all but stood on their horns in an attempt to entertain him.
            Having a child on Hurricane had proven much easier than Draco had ever thought it could.
            He looked up sharply as a disturbance moved through the herd of antelope, but apparently one of them had kicked another, and the second one had turned around and hit the first one hard in the side with its head. The first one bolted a little distance, squealed, and settled down. Draco felt able to turn back to Jeremy and the mummidade. Right now, Westshadow was standing close to him, two heads bowed until they almost touched his body and the other two turned towards the south.
            Westshadow leaped into the air as Draco watched—well, two of its bodies did, the ones that were facing south. Draco scrambled to his feet, but they came down without touching Jeremy, even though they landed right beside him.
            However, they landed solidly enough, and loudly enough, to make a ringing sound with their hooves that moved over the meadow like a buried bell.
            Boom.
            A third body moved forwards to join them, while the remaining mummid huffed and hunched over Jeremy as if to guard him from something in the air. Draco looked around wildly, but could see nothing.
            The bell-like sound was being taken up in other places, though, as other mummidade heard what was going on and added their own comments. The bell-sound seemed to be traveling south, the same direction that Westshadow was facing.
            The direction that an attack was expected to come from, if it came.
            Draco fought his way forwards, dodging Westshadow’s bodies when they wouldn’t move. He snatched up Jeremy, cradled him to his chest, and then turned around and ran for the tent. He would make sure that Jeremy was safe if he had to grow claws and stand in the tent entrance himself.
            Other people were running, he saw. Andromeda was dragging Teddy towards the big silver house she’d built as protection against the storms, although Teddy whined and tried to lunge back towards a toy he’d left on the ground. Even as Draco watched, though, a gust of wind snatched up the toy and floated it after Teddy. Teddy embraced it just before his grandmother got him inside the house and slammed the door.
            A second later, it opened again to admit Delacour and her little girl. She met Draco’s eyes and nodded, once, before the door shut after her, too.
            Draco gave a baffled little smile. It was strange to think that Delacour now recognized Draco as a fellow parent who wanted, more than anything, to make sure that his child was safe.
            But Draco didn’t slow down or spend much time thinking about it, and in a few minutes more, he and Jeremy had arrived at the tent. Draco put him gently down in the midst of his blankets, whirling around when he heard a wind sweep back the tent flap.
            It was Harry, swooping down from above and coming in even before his feet had touched the ground. “Is he all right?” he demanded.
            Draco relaxed all at once, so he almost fell over. Harry was glowing with power; Draco could feel the wild magic bouncing and bounding around the tent, winds encircling Jeremy and stiffening the tent walls and setting up guard around the door. He nodded. “Just a bit scared because the mummidade who sounded the alarm were right next to him,” he added, because Jeremy was crying, and picked him up. He switched to the bond. He and Harry had got extremely happy about having the ability to talk without raising their voices once Jeremy started raising his. What’s happening?
            Harry dipped his head and turned to look over his shoulder. They’re not sure yet. None of the riders from Open Wings’s scouts have come in, but Ron’s Apparated south, and the mummidade are sure that something is coming. Riders are up and circling. They like attacking from on high when they can. I think everyone but Ron and Hermione are under shelter.
            Draco nodded. Granger would have gone south with her Weasley even though her gifts were less immediately useful. It was where Draco would want to be if he didn’t have a child to take care of. What are you going to?
            Harry smiled at him, a smile with an edge, and Draco could feel the same edge in the winds that were picking up around him. In seconds, a miniature gale howled in Harry’s hair. At the same time, Harry reached out, and clouds began to form inside his palms.
            Take the storm to them, Harry said, and hurtled out of the tent flap and into the sky, rising so fast that Draco lost sight of him long before the tent flap fell shut.
            Draco sat back on the bed and concentrated on soothing Jeremy. If he hadn’t been here, he would have insisted that Harry take him along, or at least remain in regular contact with him down the bond. He could use Draco’s help, as that first confrontation with a summer storm had already proven.
            But now there were three of them, not two, and someone had to stay behind to take care of the baby. Draco didn’t even need to pretend that he wasn’t relieved; Harry felt the emotion down the bond, accepted and understood and forgave, and the gentleness between them lapped like a wave.
            Draco closed his eyes, and waited.
*
            You want a storm, Primrose? You’re going to have a storm.
            Harry was humming steadily to the wind as he soared up, past the level of the riders who had decided to wait for the thunderrin, past the level of low-hanging clouds, higher and higher and higher and higher. The mountains blurred in the distance. Harry got through fog and air still heated by the sunlight, and hovered in front of the sun, in a place where the wind would have frozen on his eyelids if it hadn’t been busy protecting him.
            Then he began to call.
            The call was high and wordless and so steady that Harry could only compare it to the drum of hoofbeats that the mummidade had sent echoing through the meadow a short time ago. It came from every part of him, from his magical core and his fingers and his heart and his hair. He swept back and forth through the freezing sky, wrapping warm air around himself when he started to shiver. Every direction he faced, he called.
            The winds began to speed towards him. Long before he completed the ten sweeps back and forth he had decided on, as if he were dangling on the end of a long pendulum, he had a circling cocoon around him, moving so fast that he could hear the swish of it in his ears. He turned around and aimed towards the south again with a smile.
            He had to be careful, of course. Ron and Hermione were out on the plains, and there would be riders hastening back as well. Harry didn’t want to catch any of them up in the winds and tear them to pieces.
            He touched his hands to his lips, and formed a narrow channel with his palms cupped together. Then he began to breathe.
            The winds rushed into him, swirling around inside his lungs, being breathed, mixing with the air already in his body. Coldness changed to warmth. Harry made them his and wrapped and stamped them with his wild magic.
            When he released them again, out through his skin and his ears and his eyelashes and any other place they cared to leave, they knew what he was like, and what he wanted. Any human associated with a thunderrin was to be attacked, and the thunderrin themselves; the wind carried the image and the knowledge of what thunderrin were. Any human that wasn’t with the thunderrin, and any rider or beast, was to be ignored.
            Harry continued breathing in the wind he had gathered while the already-breathed wind raced away from him, speeding to the four corners of the sky. He was still breathing when he heard thunder speaking across the northern mountains. Harry raised his head and smiled.
            Grey clouds had blown in from nowhere, and lightning danced between them. Harry didn’t know how precisely he could control that, but like the rain and the thunder and the clouds themselves, he knew that he could wrap them inside the winds. The winds would take them where he wanted them to go, and nowhere else.
            He brought his hands down, clenched together, and spread wide. The last of the wind that was going to be the storm left him; the only breezes that stayed with him were the ones he needed to support him as he hovered above the earth.
            The storm came together in front of him.
            Harry watched, feeling as though he might never need to breathe again with all the oxygen he’d taken into his body, while the grey clouds turned black, the same perfect black he saw between the stars in Hurricane’s night sky. Then the lightning flickered between them, mad as the gleam in a thestral’s eyes. And the thunder spoke again, mighty words, words of doom, and the first forerunners of the rain stung Harry’s ears.
            And his eyes, too. Harry frowned and wrapped a stronger shield of wind around himself, spinning these winds out from inside his magical core, the way he had when he was still on Earth and had no wild magic to draw on. He was getting careless and weak with his own magic if he was using all of it on the storm, and he didn’t want to fall because he was so enchanted with watching what was happening in front of him.
            As he was borne up again, the storm began to turn. Harry could feel that more than he could see it, although watching the black clouds wheel around in front of him like whips was amazing. The leashed energy of the storm surged against the leash, and then leaped up and flew with him instead of against him, towards the thunderrin.
            Harry laughed. He wished he could go with the storm, watch it attack, and watch the look on Primrose’s face when she realized what was coming for her.
            And then he thought, Why not?
            He reached back down the bond to Draco, stroking his mind and pouring wordless concern for Jeremy into the link. Draco grunted and sent back his own wordless reassurances, plus some articulate thoughts. I know that you won’t be happy until you’re sure the storm is doing what you promised it could do and defending the meadow. Go off and do what you need to.
            Harry stroked Draco’s mind once more, sent a hot bolt of desire that promised all the things they could do once he got back, and glided away, lifted and borne by the obedient air around him.
            He actually couldn’t wait.
*
            Draco cradled Jeremy to his chest and watched the walls of the tent ripple slowly back and forth. In a few seconds, the ripples calmed down. Draco swallowed. He had trusted to Harry’s guard-winds, which were stiffening the inside fabric of the tent the way that splints would support bones, to hold, but nevertheless, the immense magic of the storm moving overhead had made him worry they might tear loose and join it.
            And it was hard not to want to go up, Draco had to admit. He could feel what Harry was doing through the bond, and it was like watching a beautiful wild animal run around in front of you and knowing you could tame it, ride it, and carry on with it. And Harry got the chance to accompany it, while Draco…
            Was down here on the ground with a small, warm weight on his chest. Jeremy had finally given up on crying when nothing more exciting or frightening happened and had gone to sleep, his mouth open and a bit of drool sliding down.
            Draco smiled, and tucked his hair away from his face. Harry was where he needed to be, and Draco was the same way.
*
            Harry had never known a storm like this storm.
It was everywhere beneath him, above, below, a chaos of curling power, of sleek and shining strength. Harry reached out a hand, and lightning coiled around his wrist. He sat up, and there was rain in his eyes. He ducked down, poking his head out of clouds, and he could see the plain clearly instead of dimly.
            He saw the thunderrin.
            It turned out that he needn’t have bothered warning the storm about the riders. They had cleared out of the way, probably the minute they saw the clouds rising. They would have been more concerned about the possibility of being caught out in the rain than about the possibility of thunderrin invading the meadow, Harry thought.
            There was one figure far below him on the plains, gesturing with his hands and grabbing at the air. Ron, Harry knew, from the way that the storm abruptly weakened and spun out in little puffs near him. Harry turned his attention back to the thunderrin.
            They advanced in a V formation, with the one that Primrose rode at the head. Harry could sense, with those stupid senses that were probably a gift of becoming the gateway, how the magic around her danced and sang and soared. She was the most powerful of them, and he remembered how everyone else who rode a thunderrin had been utterly silent when they came to the meadow, letting her speak for all of them. He snorted.
            He didn’t think she could face him.
            He drew his head back inside the clouds and gestured, and the storm split into three parts. One retreated behind Harry’s back, hovering to guard the meadow. Another soared into the sky, where it would block retreat by the thunderrin should they try to go up. Harry made sure that the rain was especially strong in that part, to soak their wings.
            The third part made straight for the enemy, and Harry went with it.
            Primrose looked up as Harry bore down on her, but not with fear. She had a boiling black chaos around her hands, as though she could summon a small storm, too. They were not clouds, though, Harry was certain, but seeds. She was going to plant them in the earth if she had to, to wait, because Harry was sure they needed living bodies to grow. And she would plant them in the humans and mummidade and riders and others that Harry was trying to protect.
            She would try to plant them in Jeremy.
            Harry screamed, and Primrose’s thunderrin bucked as if the sound of a human voice calling out like that was strange. Then Harry hit her with the rain.
            The thunderrin’s rippling wings couldn’t handle that wilder air. It was flying off-course, rambling off-course, flipped up and down by the contemptuous gales. Now and then Harry thought he heard the storm laugh.
            He lashed the thunderrin floating in formation behind Primrose with rain, too, and had the satisfaction of seeing one crash to the ground. The others fought and rode better than it had, and Harry thought he felt something dripping and slimy crash against his mind, as they reached out and tried to form a bond or influence the person persecuting them.
            And then he felt something else.
            A blast of fiery pain stung his arm. Harry looked down and saw a seed there, green tendrils writhing as it tried to burrow into his flesh.
            Harry held up his arm, and what had destroyed the seed once before came at his call, in a different form. Instead of winds that circled fast enough to burn them, lightning came down and struck him, running up his veins, lighting up his arm, making it glow from the inside. Harry choked, but his magic absorbed the pain, and the roasted seed fell away from him, dead and still.
            Harry held his hands up and rotated in place, calling the lightning to him. It danced over his arms, and down his body, and Harry spun down with it, falling within it, following it, directing it to find and burn the seeds.
            And it did.
            Each moment when it struck one was full of hunger, full of wild magic, brewing and boiling in so small a space that Harry was surprised he hadn’t been able to feel it with those first seeds that he pulled out of Open Wings. And then the fire would catch, and the hunger would stop as though someone had shut a door. Harry did it again and again, and still he couldn’t get used to it, the change, the transformation, so sudden.
            When he came out of the lightning and hovered on plain wind, he found himself in front of Primrose.
            She gave him a grim smile, neither relieved nor surprised to see him there. Her thunderrin flapped its wings slowly up and down, green and purple playing over them.
            “You should have stayed away,” Harry told her softly. “Sending the seeds to try and raise new thunderrin was the last thing we intend to tolerate from you.”
            “Your scouts invaded my territory,” Primrose said. “Was I supposed to ignore that?”
            “You could have chased them away,” Harry said, “without the seeds.”
            Primrose hadn’t denied they were seeds, he realized now, or that they were meant to grow new thunderrin. Now she shrugged. “It seemed worthwhile to try and gain some new territory, if you were going to come into ours.” She held up a hand filled with what looked like more seeds, although they were brown rather than black. “And now, you’ve forced me to distribute these, which are a much more violent version of what’s come so far.”
            Harry held out an arm writhing with lightning. “I’ll cast this if you use them.”
            Primrose smiled, and curled back her hand to fling them.
            And Harry called all the force of the storm, and struck to kill.
*
            Sasunarufan13: Right on a lot of counts! And I think Draco is getting better about thinking of Jeremy as their son. As for the name, Harry threw a fit when Draco proposed anything other than a “normal” name, so this is the compromise.
            And the seeds dig down and then hatch, essentially, and feed on the host like wasp larvae on a caterpillar.
            SP777: You were also right.
- 14
- 15
- 16
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Here to Live and Die