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Reap the Hurricane	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 11501 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Sixteen—Internal Politics

            “I think you might have gone too far this time.”

            That was Hermione, but Angelina and Ron and George and Percy were nodding in echo of her. Harry leaned back with his arms folded, and then winced and straightened up as Malfoy’s magic seemed to poke him in the back. It was inconvenient, much of the time, how Malfoy could speak to him or touch him or influence him and no one would bloody notice.

            “I’m sorry,” Harry said. “I only thought that the mummidade were offering an alliance that they might not offer again, and we could use the help to survive.”

            “If they’ll give us anything.” Hermione smoothed one hand over and over down her hair, which was coiled in a long braid beside her. Harry thought she wasn’t cutting her hair specifically because it let her do this one gesture when it was long. “We don’t know yet that they mean for us to do anything but defend them against the birds.”

            “If they don’t give us anything, then we won’t help them.” Malfoy shaped his words like thrown knives. He doesn’t care where they land, either, Harry thought as he watched more than one person across from them—everyone except Bill, Fleur, and Victoire, who were still off by themselves—flinch or stick their lips together. “That’s the kind of bargain it is. We can’t afford to give help that isn’t reciprocated.”

            “But it would be easy enough for them to wait until we’ve helped them with the birds and then vanish into the grasses,” Ron pointed out, with a steadiness of temper that Harry had to commend him for, since he hadn’t stopped glaring at Malfoy since everyone had gathered in Harry and Andromeda and Teddy’s house. “How in the world are we going to track them?”

            “Wild magic,” Malfoy said, and looked at Ron as if he meant to pity him.

            “Which not everyone has,” Ron said. “That’s the point, Malfoy, the point that I don’t think you get. Because you’re strong, you think that’s enough. But we all have to survive together, and the rest of us don’t like being left out of the decision-making that you and Harry do.”

            “Admirably put,” Percy said, and nodded at Malfoy. “You know I defended you from Bill because I think you’re necessary to our survival. But you aren’t the whole of it. We have to know that our contributions are being valued, or we’re just as likely to break apart and drift away as Bill was.”

            Percy still talked like a Ministry pamphlet sometimes, Harry thought, but he made a good point. He glanced in silence at Malfoy. How are we going to answer them?

            Together.

            Harry rolled his eyes. That wasn’t how he had meant his question, but he respected that Malfoy was only telling the truth from his perspective. Any attempt to separate them would be one that Malfoy resented and the Weasleys would pay more for than it was worth. Harry made sure he was exactly as close to the Weasleys as Malfoy was and then began to speak.

            “We want to have a part in the politics here,” he said quietly, letting his eyes travel from face to face. “Not the whole thing. I don’t want as much responsibility as I’ve had, frankly. Maybe I was the only one who could persuade the lot of you to emigrate—” although Harry suspected the impulse had come mostly from the fact that Ron and Hermione wouldn’t let him go alone, and where one Weasley went, the others followed “—but that’s a job I can let go of now that we’re here. We need to work together, right. Then I can give up the responsibility of making decisions for everyone, and you can have some of it. That’s the right solution. That would make everyone happy.”

            “Except Malfoy,” Percy said, and his face had come alive in a way that Harry had only seen before when he was discussing the rules and traditions of Hogwarts as a Prefect. “That’s the point, isn’t it, Harry? You would probably have asked our permission and not tried to set yourself up as a negotiator with the mummidade if not for him. But because he’s here, the bond and the wild magic are changing you.”

            Harry felt the snarling bristle beside him, and didn’t bother looking at Malfoy. He could feel the expression on Malfoy’s face sliding up his own veins, coming out on his own face.

            “The wild magic is changing all of us, you idiot,” said Malfoy. Since they were the words Harry would have spoken, other than the insult at the end, he kept quiet, and Malfoy prowled forwards, his body hunched and his head thrust out like a predator’s. Harry put his hand on Malfoy’s shoulder and felt the power thrumming along. He wanted to lean his cheek on it and feel it supporting him, but in the meantime, he watched the Weasleys’ faces instead. “It affects us more prominently, because of the way that Potter had it before he came to Hurricane and because of the life-debts that we owe each other.”

            Harry blinked. That was a way of looking at it that hadn’t occurred to him. But he would need time to ponder it, and he could already feel the way that Malfoy’s mind reached out to his, curling around him like a whip of spikes, touching and binding, promising comfort and explanation later. He waited.

            “Your—brother has been affected, too,” Malfoy continued, and Harry knew that he had barely avoided saying “you werewolf.” “Now you know that. And you’re changing, I’m sure, though you might not have noticed yet. The change that happened to your brother wasn’t subtle, but you excused it as belonging to something else for a long time. What else have you felt or done that isn’t something you might have felt or done back in the old world? And what have you attributed to something other than the magic?”

            Harry noticed that both Ginny and Hermione sat up, and made a mental note to ask them later. Malfoy’s will rose up against that, but Harry thought it important enough to ignore the impulse to agree, this once. They needed to know who else in the camp could speak with the mummidade, if nothing else, and if they didn’t have bonds like that yet, they might have to encourage the formation of some of them.

            That would also necessitate the way that you think of our bond changing.

            We were enemies a short time ago, and no one else looks inclined to fuck someone other than their wives or girlfriends, Harry snapped back, and Malfoy laughed in the back of his throat, in the back of his mind, his claws stroking around Harry’s throat and spine.

            We will talk.

            Before Harry could retort, Malfoy continued. “We’re all changing, but we are the ones who have changed furthest and fastest, and come closest to Hurricane’s native creatures in the process. That makes us the best negotiators with them, right now. You can change and come closer, I think. But if you insist that we should give you that power and that specific task when you haven’t shown that you can do it yet, then it’s ridiculous.”

            “The mummidade might speak to you,” Percy said, his eyes still brilliant, “but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk about the alliances that you make, and the aid that you promised.”

            Malfoy smiled. “Unless the rest of you are experts at hiding your gifts, then no one else has the ability to kill the birds yet. Potter and I are the ones who would do it, no matter what the rest of you agreed on.”

            “Harry?” Percy turned to look at him. “He calls you by your last name, and stands there with this smug look on his face whenever he mentions you. Does he speak for you? I mean, is that really the kind of thing you want him to say, and are you standing at his side because you really agree, or just because of the magic?”

            He’s not speaking like a Ministry pamphlet now, Harry thought, and took a deep breath that passed through thorns on the way up his throat.

            Malfoy didn’t speak in his head. He simply watched, and Harry knew that his answer right now could change things, could destroy things. He shuddered for a moment—



But it was the same power he had always had, ever since he had found out that he could wield the wind. This was only a different form of it.

He paused for a moment, to bid farewell to the simplicities that had still constructed his life even after he came to Hurricane, and said, “He speaks for me. We both made the alliance, even though I questioned doing it, and he’s right that we would be the ones defending the camp and killing the birds the mummidade want us to slaughter. We’re—we’re bonded. We don’t always agree, between ourselves, but in something like this, we’re always going to be on the same side.”

And he reached out and put his hand on Malfoy’s shoulder, in time to feel the bond between them purr like a leopard.

*

Draco would very much have liked to go off alone with Potter just at that moment.

Not to fuck him. But because he wanted to look into his eyes and repeat his words back to him and make him acknowledge what he had done, what he felt, that he had finally made his decision and claimed both Draco and the bond.

But there were Weasleys to convince, and although a few of them looked sufficiently shocked into silence, the Ministry lackey still spoke. “Then you have to remember that the rest of us are here, that’s all,” he said, his face more pointed with challenge than Draco had ever seen his own, even in a mirror when he was young. “And you have to remember that the alliance with the mummidade can change.”

            “How?” Draco asked, because Potter still looked reluctant to speak against any Weasley whatsoever. And he had said in their hearing, and couldn’t take back, that Draco spoke for him. “How are we going to change it? Why would we change it? Do you distrust them that much already, to think they would make the alliance and then try to win labor from us without doing anything in return?”

            The lackey shook his head. He had turned to Draco and looked him in the eye now, rather than with his nostrils. “It’s not that. If we decide we want something else from them, though, then you have to negotiate with them in good faith. Not just tell them what you want to say, and pretend that you’re hearing what you want to hear.”

            Draco stretched, and let his claws fan out from his hand to cut several blades of grass nearby. More than one Weasley jumped. Not the sister, though; Draco noticed her watching him carefully, as if she would work out a way to acquire wild magic from that. Draco smiled at her and smirked at the lackey, to let everyone else know the difference.

            “The raw fact is that only we have the power to communicate with them,” he told the lackey. “That’s what troubles you, I think. Not relying on the mummidade and the alliance with them when you think they may change their minds. Relying on us.”

            “Well, yeah,” said the lackey, which at least increased Draco’s estimation of him. He knew when there was no point in maneuvering subtly when Draco had begun the contest bluntly. “You were a Slytherin until recently—”

            “Stop thinking in terms of Hogwarts Houses, Percy.” Potter stirred beside Draco, and the power that hammered through him made Draco want to reach out and caress him again. He refrained because of Potter’s sensibilities, not the Weasleys’. “You have plenty of reason to hate Malfoy without that. We might as well talk about those.”

            The lackey nodded. “You’re right. What he did to Bill. What his father did to Ginny. And what his family did to all of us in the war.”

            “There’s a lot less personal there, unless you’re also going to count all of the Death Eaters as harming your family.” Potter looked inclined to simply charge and scatter them all, and Draco felt the pressure of a breeze on his hair. “Give up on it, Percy, honestly. He’s saved Ginny’s life and paid back the debt that Lucius owed her, and Bill needs to calm down and get control of his wild magic before any of us will know what happened as a result of his scars and what was Hurricane. And your mum killed his aunt, but you don’t see Malfoy holding grudges over that, do you?”



            Because my aunt was mad and I wanted to kill her myself, Draco could have said, but there was no reason for him to utter such shit when Potter was speaking. He leaned hard enough on Potter’s shoulder that the idiot had to support himself with wind, and waited.

            The lackey nodded, as though it was a good point that hadn’t been brought up before. “That’s true. But it still makes him hard to live with, hard to trust.”

            Potter managed to exude disdain without once changing the position of his body. Draco had to admit that took talent, and he licked his lips without meaning to, edging a bit closer to Potter. “If I’ve managed to accept this bond to him without screaming about my lack of trust in him, perhaps you could put up with an alliance?”

            The lackey flushed and looked back and forth between them in silence. Then he bowed deeply and said, “I’m sorry, Harry. That was unworthy of me. I should have thought—and we did make a bargain with him to forgive the life-debt that Ginny owed him if we didn’t remind him about his past anymore. I’m sorry, Malfoy.”

            Draco simply stood still and stared at the lackey, who flushed a brighter red and hurried towards the greenhouses as if he remembered a new errand. Draco wanted to shake his head, only everyone around him, except Potter, would interpret that gesture the wrong way. It seemed that some Gryffindors really did exist who played by the rules of logic alone and could regulate their emotions by it.

            “Percy doesn’t speak for all of us.” That was the Weasley mother, standing up with her arms folded. Looking at her, Draco found it hard not to see the woman who had killed his aunt. “I don’t think that we should trust someone like him, Harry.”

            “But you chose to,” Potter said. “You chose to have him here for weeks without driving him away, and you said that you wouldn’t harass him because of how he saved Ginny. You didn’t keep that promise.”

            The Weasley mother flushed, but didn’t back away, which showed that rules of logic were of less use with her. Then again, Draco had never believed they would go that far. “You’re not thinking straight, Harry,” she said softly. “You don’t know about the history between us, or how hard it is for us to see you tangled in a bond you didn’t choose.”

            Draco said nothing, although he could have and Potter would have accepted it, because he was curious to see Potter’s response for himself. He watched him out of the corner of his eye and with the bond, and waited.

*

            How many times am I going to have to fucking say this?

            Harry sighed. At least he could hope it would get easier each time, the way that thinking about Dumbledore being dead got easier each day.

            “He’s bonded to me,” Harry said. “I didn’t choose it, but we didn’t choose a lot of things about Hurricane, including the birds and the mummidade. That doesn’t change a thing when it comes to the fact that we did choose to freely come here. We have to put up with what we found. I have to put up with Malfoy.”

            Malfoy shoved him, hard. Harry recovered his balance and didn’t look at him. He knew they would be having words about that later, but it was the best comparison between their solution and the Weasleys’, and he wanted this constant reassurance and placation to stop. He could say that he trusted Malfoy again, and again, and it still didn’t seem to convince them.

            Then you have to say it again and again, just like you needed to labor to survive here. It’s part of the labor of survival. You chose to come here. That means you have to make it work.

            “My poor boy,” Molly whispered. “I wish that you could have lived happily ever after, and now it looks like you won’t.” Her eyes went misty as she looked at him.

            Harry wanted to bow his head and bang it against a wall, although the wall in this case was Molly. That fear went straight back to Harry announcing that he was going to help Andromeda raise Teddy. Molly had been concerned the task was too much for Harry when he was so young, and she had also expressed a fear that he wouldn’t ever have children of his own.

            But Harry was doing it, and he thought he was doing a pretty good job so far, if not a perfect one.

            “You’re making it harder,” he told Molly.

            He saw her blink and look at him uncertainly, which made a nice change from the constant, self-assured stare. “What?”

            “You’re making living here harder,” Harry said. “Just like you made raising Teddy harder when you said I was too young for it. And now you’re making being bonded to Malfoy harder. Yeah, I wish that Remus and Tonks were alive and could raise Teddy, too. And I wish that I had a choice about the bond. But things have become this way, and we have to live with the consequences. Please stop telling me how much you regret it, because I don’t.”

            It was his final hope, that laying out the words like that and telling them that they were hurting him would make them stop picking away at Malfoy. Whatever faults the Weasleys had, they had always loved Harry and cared about how he felt. If they knew how they were hurting him, Harry thought they would stop.

            Sure enough, Molly’s hand went to her mouth, and her eyes flooded with tears. That was difficult to watch, but Harry accepted the hard, trembling hug that Molly enfolded him in and the way she murmured into his ear. “Of course, Harry. I never knew—I didn’t think about it. But I’m so sorry.”

            Arthur came up to shake his hand and beg his pardon, and George gave him a wary smile. The others, Harry thought, had nothing to apologize for; Ginny and Charlie had been making an effort to get along with Malfoy, and Percy was converted, and he hoped Bill would be. And Ron and Hermione’s loyalty to him was too great for mere words. They would follow him, in the end, as long as he could reassure them this was the truth.

            After that, there was more rational talk about the mummidade and a consensus that they would have to wait and see, and Harry, to his relief, could go away and take care of Teddy for a while, as Malfoy took his turn on camp guard. Before he departed, though, he reached over and squeezed Harry’s arm hard enough to leave a set of fingerprints. Harry promptly turned his arm so no one else could see it, and nodded, and departed.

            He might have managed to win peace from the Weasleys, but that wasn’t the same as making peace with Malfoy.

*

            “This is my house, and I don’t want you in it.”

            Draco looked steadily at Andromeda Black, and thought about shoving past her. But she was Teddy’s grandmother, and that meant he wanted to keep up a good relationship with her, if he could. He didn’t think she cared.

            “It’s our house,” Potter’s voice said, before Draco could make up his mind what to reply, and his face appeared behind Andromeda’s shoulder. “Come in, Malfoy, please. Forgive her.”

            Draco nodded and moved past Andromeda, who didn’t actually lift her hand to stop him. Potter was cradling Teddy, who had gone to sleep with his head drooping back and his mouth open. Draco dropped down on his knees in front of Teddy and reached out.

            Potter looked at him, bright and wary.

            And then he handed Teddy to Draco, and nodded back, his mind whirling with the images of Draco guarding Teddy when he’d been at play in the pool.

            Draco rocked Teddy back and forth, keeping his head bowed so that his chin brushed Teddy’s hair, and he could murmur a reassurance when Teddy woke and said something in a soft, confused voice. He looked around, saw the small pallet that was Teddy’s—Potter didn’t have a separate one, although it looked as if Andromeda did—and laid him down on it. A few tucks with pillow and blanket later, and Teddy was gone, although he did say something that Draco thought was “Good night.” Draco whispered it back and then stood and turned around to face Potter.

            Potter’s face was bright pink. He nodded to Draco and said, “You wanted to talk to me about something.”

            “Not here,” Draco said, letting his eyes dart and cut at Andromeda. Potter’s mind stirred with currents of protest, but in the end, he let it go with a sigh and nodded, following Draco out of the house.

            Draco began to walk away without looking over his shoulder to see if Potter was following. He had fucking well better be, and if he wasn’t, then he could take his chances with Draco’s weapons.

            They walked beyond the edge of the camp, beyond the greenhouses and the small, warded plot of ground where the werewolf was staying with his wife and daughter. Potter’s winds reached out to it, the bond told Draco, and came back with no scent of blood. That appeared to be enough for Potter’s concern about Delacour-Weasley’s safety, and the little girl’s, because the next moment he followed Draco.

            Draco reached a hill that still had long grass and turned around, sitting down to face Potter. Potter sat down in response, his hands folded behind him. His body would have looked relaxed if one knew nothing about him.

            Or if you have no bond.

            The reminder that he had a link to Potter no one else could fairly claim relaxed Draco. He leaned in. Potter visibly tensed, the pulse in his throat fluttering so hard that Draco thought it would explode outwards like a Snitch.

            “What more do you want?” Potter demanded suddenly. “I told the Weasleys that I was bonded to you and that you spoke for me and that I didn’t regret it. What else do you think you can take from me?”

            “Only what’s my due,” Draco said. The sentence didn’t sound as smooth as it had in his head. And Potter, from the way he smirked and ripped his head to the side, knew it.

            “Tell me what that is, then.” Potter’s voice remained clipped. “I think the Weasleys will treat you with more respect, now. For Andromeda, it’ll almost certainly take a longer time. And—”

            “I don’t care about that,” Draco said, and clarified when Potter simply gaped at him. “I don’t care about them. I want to know that you stay with me out of something more than bitter necessity, something more than facts.”

            Potter hesitated, then picked up a blade of grass and tossed it in the air. His winds played with it like kittens with a string, gamboling and tossing, which conveniently allowed him to avoid focusing on Draco’s face. “I don’t know what you mean. I thought that was what you wanted the Weasleys to think.”

            “The Weasleys,” Draco said, taking Potter’s arm between his claws because he could, “not you.”

            Potter closed his eyes in that tired-to-death way that Draco hated. “I don’t hate you. I respect your fighting ability. I slept with you. I hunted with you. What—what else do you want? A love declaration? Because that’s not what you’re going to get, and I can feel enough of your emotions to know that you don’t really want one, anyway.”

            Draco curled his fingers deeper, taking in the feeling of muscle and skin. “No,” he said quietly, and leaned in so that he could speak against Potter’s cheek. “It’s not what I want.”

            Potter opened his mouth, and Draco’s tongue was there, sliding in. Potter groaned and gave way beneath him, but in the same resigned way that he had when they first fucked, and Draco sighed, forced a knee between Potter’s legs, and leaned down to speak plainly, since Potter was still too good at denying what flowed down the bond, and they did better with words.

            “I want some fucking enthusiasm.”

            Potter tensed beneath him for a moment, as though that would be the one, of all Draco’s demands, to drive him off. Then he arched up and nearly bit Draco’s tongue in his kissing, in his hands that were beneath Draco’s shirt and in his hair and on his shoulders, scratching and driving in and scratching some more when Draco tried to pull back and take his shirt off.

            Maybe he wanted that, too, Draco thought, dazed, getting the shirt off and focusing on the way that Potter’s winds whistled around his ears. But he didn’t want to show it because he thought I didn’t want it…

            Potter kissed him, and Draco gave up the tiresome game of figuring out which Gryffindor emotions went where, for the pure pleasure and success of kissing Potter.

*

            SP777: The other creatures will show up in the next story, the sequel to this one. (I decided the story was too long to be told in one part). That story will be called Wondrous Lands and Oceans.

            The Weasleys notice the way Harry and Draco are reacting around each other, but they aren’t yet sure how it works.
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Reap the Hurricane