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Wondrous Lands and Oceans	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10108 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Chapter Sixteen—Like A Map



            Harry turned his head from side to side. They had settled down in a hollow between fairly large hills for the night; there was a pool of water for them, and even boulders to brace their backs against. Winds guarded the camp, strung from hilltop to hilltop like enormous fences, and Harry had arched more wind above in a protective dome. They were safe from most things, and would have advance notice even about birds attacking them. They were safe.

            But the fear still stalked up and down his spine, and hovered on his shoulder and hissed near his ear, and made him want to tear paper up just to hear the soothing sounds it would make.

            Go to sleep.

            Harry shuddered a little as the words whispered down the bond, and glanced at Draco. To all appearances, he lay asleep on one side of the dying fire. As Harry watched, though, he stirred, lifted his head, and glared at him. Then he made an imperative summoning motion with his curved hand, and Harry crossed the grass to kneel down in front of him.

            Draco grasped the back of his neck and tugged him into a kiss. Harry struggled not to make noise that would wake up Ron and Hermione. They were curled up in the same set of blankets, but they only held each other, and snored, and he thought they really were asleep.

            “Draco!” he whispered aloud.

            Use the bond to talk to me, if you’re so concerned about your little friends, Draco hissed at him, and flung his leg around Harry’s waist, bearing him down, tugging him close, reaching for his cock and twisting it until Harry hissed in turn and batted his hand away. You’re being ridiculous. Nothing trailed us from the place with the silver oval. I’m sure that one of us would have spotted it.

            Sprawled on the grass with Draco’s hands roughly jerking at his clothes, Harry found the ability to smile into the earth tickling his cheek. You’re still pissed that Ron spotted that notch pointing north before you did, aren’t you?

            It was a remarkable feat of observation, Draco said, and shoved himself up on an elbow to glare at Harry. He had a smear of dirt around his lip that Harry wanted to preserve for the sheer rarity of anything like that, but of course Draco felt the thought and swabbed irritably at it with one hand, knocking it off. Which means that I should have been the one to perform it.

            You’re quite remarkable all by yourself, Harry said, and squirmed around into a more comfortable position, getting his hand into the act at the same time.

            Stroked, wanked, Draco shut his eyes and tilted his head backwards, yielding to the pull of Harry’s hand. Harry liked to watch him like that, and not just because it was a rare chance to see Draco giving in. His hair fluttered with his soft, short breaths, and he tilted his head further and further back, while his hands went loose around Harry’s waist. Harry licked his left hand and brought it down.

            “Oh, fuck!” Draco said, which made Ron and Hermione stir in their blankets and murmur something that might have been a question.

            Harry hissed reassuringly back at them, and kept his eyes and his hands full of Draco. Draco was jerking in place now, leaning forwards to plow into Harry’s palm and wrist. Harry gave one final pull, turning his left hand and right hand in the same direction, and Draco leaned on his shoulder and came.

            In the silence after that, Harry cleaned Draco up and tucked him back in. He wondered what he could say, if he should say anything, and then decided there was no need. Draco would feel his enormous smugness coming down the bond, and that was enough.

            Not for Draco, though, it seemed. His eyes flashed open and he hauled on Harry’s shoulders, spilling him down and backwards. Before Harry thought to struggle, Draco had arranged them so that Harry was sitting with his back against Draco’s chest, his arms pinned against his chest by one of Draco’s, and Draco’s hands tugging and swearing and fumbling around him.

            Harry could have broken free easily, especially since Draco had only one arm to hold his and the winds waited breathless in the air around him, ready to strike. But why should he? He tilted his head back, and yielded, feeling a deliciousness in the way his muscles relaxed, like flowing water.

            Draco’s breath stuttered in his ear, and then Draco said, You’ve never yielded that way even when I fucked you.

            Mmmm. Harry turned his head and brushed his cheek up and down Draco’s, feeling as languorous as a great cat with a fire of its own. But this time, I want to.

            And he remained still-limbed and passive, and felt what it did to Draco, how his hands went slack several times, as if he wanted so much that he could barely remember to touch Harry. His breath hummed in and out of his lungs as Draco stroked him, caressed him, held him close, and his orgasm was slow in the coming but more violent than usual, breaking him out and wringing him against Draco.

            Draco nuzzled his cheek, his hands everywhere, sliding on Harry’s chest as he cleaned Harry up with a charm. Harry, who had used his winds to dry Draco and blow the crusted bits away, snorted and circled himself into Draco’s arms.

            Around them, the barriers of wind were firm from hilltop to hilltop. The wind roaring through the sky had dropped, and in all that vast heaven and haven of Hurricane, Harry could feel no storm building.

            “There,” Draco said, satisfaction and exhaustion both strong in his voice. “Now go to sleep.”

            Harry never knew if he heard those last words in reality, or if his brain had managed to supply them, as he and Draco slid together into longing, into lounging, into liquid, leaning against each other.

*

            Draco woke the next morning to find Weasley staring at him.

            Draco stared back, lifting his head to look around the camp. Granger was still asleep beside the fire, he saw, and was vaguely surprised. He had thought she and Weasley slept so tightly twined together that Weasley wouldn’t be able to move without waking her. And Harry was with him, the bond as limp in his mind as a fishing line trailing from a broken pole. Draco let his hands rest on Harry’s shoulders and whispered, “What?”

            “Try to make a little less noise next time,” Weasley whispered back, and walked towards the fire, opening the satchel they had brought along that held the food.

            Draco felt his face flush, but he also had to smile. What he and Harry had done was only what Weasley and Granger would have liked to do, if they had thought they could get away with it.

            He shook Harry gently. Harry rolled over at once, waking immediately the way he always did, but this time, unlike most, he didn’t start to his feet and look around for a threat. He smiled up at Draco, open, heartbreaking, relaxed, and his winds gathered at the nape of Draco’s neck and tugged him gently down for a kiss hello.

            Draco went, ignoring the way that Weasley kept his back resolutely turned on the other side of the fire. Draco couldn’t really blame him for that. He probably would have done the same thing if Weasley and Granger had been going at it.

            But for Harry to be doing this in front of his friends, even if he didn’t know right now that they had heard them…

            I can hear that kind of thing from your mind in the same way you can hear it from mine. Harry snorted and lazily wrapped his real hand around Draco’s neck, fingers working in and out of his hair in a way that made Draco’s eyes shut in pleasure. It doesn’t matter, Draco. I wanted to enjoy you. I got to.

            And that was it, really, that Harry could represent them both unblushing, uncaring about what Weasley and Granger thought. Draco got hard again, and thrust against Harry’s arse until Harry shut his eyes and laughed.

            “Not this morning,” he said, and rolled away from Draco, leaving Draco to cover himself up hastily as Weasley glanced their way. “I hope that you don’t mind, but I should check the wind barriers and go aloft to make sure no storms are blocking our way.” He flung Draco a final steamy glance, and Weasley a wave, and the newly-awakened Granger a smile, and then himself upwards. Draco watched him rise, feeling the wild magic weaving around him until it nearly swallowed Harry up in wreaths of protection.

            Only then did he cast a charm that would will his erection down whether it wanted to go or not, adjust his trousers, and stand up. Granger glanced at him as he did.

            “You could have made a little less noise,” she said, and yawned into her hands as she pushed her fluffy, frizzy morning hair back and forth on her head. It made sounds when she did that which Draco could only shudder at.

            “The next time, go ahead and make all the noise that you want,” Draco said generously as he strode off to find a patch of grass he could piss on. “It’s only fair.”

            That made them both blush and shut their mouths, a satisfactory combination. Draco grinned as he rounded one of the boulders. He could do with relief for his mind as well as his bladder.

*

            The silver ovals appeared again and again as they made their way north. And so did the notches at the front of the small areas that seemed to mark the way north, pointing.

            Harry had an argument with Hermione about whether those were really arrows when the people, or creatures, that had lived on Hurricane had no reason to attach significance to that shape. It was Hermione’s position that it didn’t really matter whether they could have called them arrows, or assigned that shape to them; they were functioning that way anyway, guiding anyone who came behind along the path to their destination.

            Harry thought they might mean something different, but everyone else outvoted them, and they kept along the straight track.

            The plains were beginning to change, the grass becoming shorter and the ground hillier and more rolling. Harry squinted at what looked like a line of dark mist along the northern horizon about noon, and sent his winds to try and see if they could disperse it. They couldn’t, and a few minutes of flight later, everyone could see it for themselves.

            “It’s mountains,” Hermione breathed, leaning out of her chair until Harry used a strap of wind like a belt to fix her in place. Hermione gave him a reproachful look for that, which Harry glared back at. He wasn’t about to have her fall on his watch. “Real mountains. I thought we’d left them behind forever when we came here.”

            Real mountains, Draco echoed in Harry’s mind. Awfully regular, for real mountains. I would have assumed the winds of Hurricane would have had time to work on them, and wear them down.

            Harry shrugged uneasily as he studied the jagged shoulders of rock ahead of them, dark enough to be basalt. They thrust aggressively up into the sky. Maybe the people, or creatures, who had left those silver ovals could have known what an arrow shape was after all, if they had seen these. The winds of Hurricane are magical. They might not work in the same way as Earth winds when it comes to wearing things down.

            Draco snorted, but since neither of them had any convincing argument, it remained on the level of a mental disagreement as they flew closer and closer.

            Harry watched the crags for the signs of birds’ nests. He was expecting them to rise up continually as they flew and flew, and his shoulders tightened as they didn’t. He could hear Draco jeering in the back of his head about Harry’s disappointment when no danger came along, but he ignored that. He could tell Draco was as nervous as he was, if for different reasons.

            “You don’t think that this is where the thing in the north lives?” Ron asked suddenly, one of Harry’s winds obediently capturing the words and bringing them up to him. “It’s in the north, after all, and it looks forbidding enough.”

            Harry shrugged again, and aimed them slightly west of north. There was something different about the mountains there, and he wanted to get a glimpse of what it was.

            They saw when they get high enough, though if they had been riding the winds among the peaks themselves, Harry doubted they would have. The mountain peaks surrounded a deep, jagged bowl, a hollow really, which plunged straight down into darkness, instead of bending and twisting like a normal valley.

            What the fuck do you know about normal valleys? Draco said this time.

            You could find a less irritating way to vent your irritation, Harry said, and bent his head to the side. No, there was no lake at the bottom, or river, although he had expected to find one. Down there was nothing but withered dust and stone, kept from the sunlight so long that nothing could grow there.

            “What is it?” Hermione asked, once again leaning out of her chair. Harry adjusted her position absentmindedly, and shook his head.

            “I would say that it’s a place where something was scooped out,” Harry said. “But that leads to the question of what would have been there to leave such a great hole. Another mountain?”

            “That’s all you can think about, when you phrased it that way?” Draco asked flatly. “Because my first thought is: Who scooped it?”

            “Or what,” Ron said.

            “Thank you for making it all the more creepy, Weasley,” Draco snapped, and folded his arms around himself. Harry coiled warm winds about his neck and shoulders, although he knew that he wasn’t really cold. Draco gave him a narrow-eyed look, a nod, and a slight thawing of the cold bond between them, in approximately that order. Harry turned away so he could hide his smile.

            “I don’t know what did it,” Hermione said. “But I think it might be the thing that we’re going to meet.”

            Since she had said what they were all thinking, no one disagreed aloud. Harry saw Ron glance back at the southern horizon, though, and knew that he was wishing they didn’t have to do this. Harry smiled at him. “Remember the basilisk,” he said. “And the way we went after the Philosopher’s Stone. That turned out all right.”

            What? Draco hummed in the back of his mind, and started searching for the relevant memories. Harry ignored the rifling. At least it wasn’t as painful as the Legilimency that Snape had used to search his mind.

            “Yeah,” Ron said. “But we had some idea of what we were facing, there. We have no idea what this thing is.”

            Harry shook his head. “I know it seems like we did. But remember how many of the professors’ traps were surprises, and that we knew what the basilisk was but not what it would really be like. I think that’s the difference. This isn’t much more dangerous, but it does seem that way because we’re older and more cautious. What?” he added, because Ron was gaping at him.

            Ron shut his mouth and shrugged. “I just never thought I’d hear common sense from you, that’s all. Or philosophy. I was surprised.”

            “Harry’s not stupid.”

            Harry turned slowly in midair to stare at Draco, who had spoken the words. Draco stared back at him with flat eyes and gave a small shrug that made Harry want to roll his eyes. You know that’s not what he meant, he settled for saying instead. And that you’re getting along with him better than that, and not you’re sullen just to be sullen.

            “I know you didn’t mean it that way, Ron,” Harry said aloud. “Anyway. We’ve come this far. A bit silly to go back when we have no idea what’s threatening the mummidade, and whether it would threaten us or not.”

            Ron made a skeptical sound, but he was in the chair, leaning back as if relaxed, as Harry led them around that hole in the mountains. Hermione was looking thoughtful, and had actually pulled out parchment and a quill to scribble with. Harry thought he’d heard her mutter a Sticking Charm to make sure the quill stayed on her hand, and he smiled. That was his friends, always the same loyal people although the world changed.

            Literally.

            You can stop praising them any time you like.

            You know he didn’t mean it that way, Harry said, glancing back at Draco, who deliberately hovered somewhere between him and the chairs carrying Ron and Hermione, glaring at him but coming no nearer. What’s the matter? Did something else happen that I didn’t notice? He would have thought that impossible, with the bond connecting them the way it did, but God knew that he had missed important events in his friends’ lives before this.

            It isn’t—he just had no right to sound surprised that you can speak the truth and common sense sometimes. Draco drifted sideways with his arms folded, and although the winds caught him up and started him moving with the rest of them a moment later, he still maintained the almost still position.

            You would have agreed with him, a few months ago when we first came here. Harry hesitated before calling it “months,” but he still wasn’t sure what other timeframe to use. Hurricane had an apparently endless spring, and they had known the seasons wouldn’t be an accurate measure of Earth time.

            That has nothing to do with it.

            It apparently didn’t, and the best Harry could do was lift his hands for peace and retreat. He didn’t get the way Draco was reacting, but he understood the sudden fits of anger that had sometimes come between them, and he had no wish to provoke one now.

*

            This is so bloody dangerous.



            Draco had even sent that thought to Harry a few times, but received no acknowledgment. He didn’t think Harry was refusing to respond, so much as thinking so much of the same thing himself and concentrating so hard on the journey ahead of them that the thought blended into the background noise of his mind.

            Draco shook his head. The terms of their alliance with the mummidade didn’t require them to walk, or fly, straight into danger and offer themselves up as willing sacrifices. He wished that Harry had come up with some other way to tackle this.

            On the other hand, what way was there? They couldn’t wait for news from other people, or send someone expendable and hope they would report back. This was the other side of being the important, the invaluable, defenders of the camp that he and Harry were. They had no one else competent to go and face the danger.

            In the end, Draco could do nothing but sigh, and decide to keep alert. And not snap at Weasley about stupid things, because it only made Harry upset and weakened the bonds of their group. Perhaps Weasley had meant no more than the kind of rough teasing that he also seemed to bestow on Granger.

            Although if he shows any sign of being attracted to Harry…

            Harry laughed at him, and Draco went back to paying attention to the route.

            They passed several more of the scooped-out hollows, but otherwise it was mountains that flowed beneath them—mountains with no valleys, peaks packed close together as though to bar the way to something. Draco wondered if someone had put them there for just such a reason, and ended up shaking his head. They had encountered no one so far on Hurricane with the power to do that. The birds and the winds were mindless, and if the mummidade could have done that, they would probably have the power to protect themselves from the birds, too.

            Harry finally called a halt when the sky had begun to turn blue around the edges. Draco wondered where they would camp, but Harry turned to the west and found them a foothill carpeted with some small, smooth patches of grass. They could take shelter among boulders and drink from a stream of water, at least.

            Granger spent much of the time while the food cooked scribbling, but she didn’t show them what she was doing until the end of the meal. Then she handed the parchment to Weasley and fell on the untouched food in front of her with something like exhaustion and satisfaction mingling in her face.

            “What is it?” Weasley asked, and held out the parchment to Draco, as though he was the only one who could make sense of Granger’s handwriting.

            Stifling the temptation to say that this proved that Weasley thought Harry was stupid, because he hadn’t offered the parchment to him, Draco bent over and looked. He ended up shaking his head, though. Granger had drawn the diagram of ovals and lines that they had seen in the ruins; she had either a much better memory than Draco had thought, or she had made a copy of it at the time. “What about it?”

            “Don’t you see?” Granger looked up, ignoring the curious way Harry looked at her. Draco wondered whether Harry was as much a stranger to his two best friends as it seemed, and how they had stayed friends in the face of all that.

            Because I know how to be flexible.

            Draco would have sent back a wicked pun on the last word, but Granger was continuing. “The position of the ovals corresponds to the position of those holes in the mountains.”

            Draco stared at her. Then he said, “But that map, if that was what it was, showed many more ovals than we’ve seen hollows. And you can’t determine what the orientation of the map was, anyway, or what the distance between the points was meant to be, or—anything. Where are you getting this?”

            Granger turned her hand over. “I’ve told you what I believe. It remains what I believe. I’m sure that’s what it is. If you work it out on a certain scale, then the distances are right. And the ovals are roughly the same shape as the hollows.”

            “If you work it out on a certain scale, Harry and I are cousins to everyone else on Earth,” Draco said. “Because it’s all incest if you go back far enough, isn’t that right? And the ovals could be the holes, and they could be anything else that you want them to be. Because we don’t know the bloody key, Granger. We don’t even know the shape of the lock.”

            Granger shrugged and wrapped her arms primly around her legs. “I know what I saw.”

            Draco opened his mouth to continue arguing, and then the surge of fear down the bond from Harry sent him bounding to his feet. Harry turned back to them, and Draco realized it wasn’t fears of being called stupid or lack of interest that had made him stay silent. His face was pale, his hair rippling with the rising breeze.

            “A storm’s coming,” he said briefly. “And this one is going to be worse than any we’ve seen since we’ve been here.”

*

            SP777: I was expecting much longer breaks between the chapters, to show them living years on Hurricane.

            You mean the bow Draco gives Ron? I made it up, as far as I know.

            Silverkitten: Not at all! Glad you enjoyed it. And it’s extremely unlikely that humans as we know them would evolve on Hurricane, but something sufficiently like them to use maps might.

            The oval might also transport the things dropped into it somewhere.

            unneeded: No answers right now, I’m afraid.
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Wondrous Lands and Oceans