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Reap the Hurricane	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 11499 -:- 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 Eighteen—Hatching the Wind

            Draco ran behind Potter as they made their way towards the egg. The whole camp was in motion, as far as he could tell, except for the Primrose woman, who huddled on the hill at the farthest edge and tried to pretend she was the color of the grasses. Draco sneered. She couldn’t watch for enemies by looking their way.

            Potter moved his head like a roped horse, and Draco laughed at him. It truly bothers you to hear me criticizing anything, doesn’t it?

            Potter jumped over a small ditch in the ground in front of them and ran on without answering. Draco panted behind him, enjoying the wind in his mouth and the danger coiling in his stomach. Perhaps they would have to kill the hatching bird. Perhaps the hatching would draw other birds and they would have to slaughter them. Perhaps the Weasleys would object to the young bird actually surviving and he and Potter would fall together, back against back, to fight the red-haired rodents.

            Draco’s skull hummed with the tension coming at him from Potter’s direction. Draco laughed and laughed, and ran on.

            They arrived at the egg with plenty of time to spare, if the numerous but shallow cracks in the shell’s surface meant anything. Draco let the back of his hand rest against Potter’s shoulder and glanced around at the others. There seemed to be every denizen of the camp there except Primrose, the children, and Delacour-Weasley and his aunt, no doubt staying behind with the children.

            The werewolf lurked at the edge of the boiling activity, mostly caused by the dragon-keeper and the remaining twin, who ran around in circles and bellowed contradictory orders. He caught Draco’s eye and glanced to the side with his scars burning.

            I don’t care about him, as long as he doesn’t try to move, Draco thought, and turned so that he was balancing more lightly on the balls of his feet and could spring towards the werewolf if he caught him charging.

            Potter’s head buzzed and swarmed with the confusion he felt, seeing Draco, the coward who didn’t want to kill, so ready to do so. Draco snapped back at him that killing with claws was easier than killing with a wand, and received a thick, murky soup of emotions in return, containing currents that he didn’t want to think about.

            The egg shuddered, and one of the cracks worked itself deeper. By now, the sky was bluer than Draco had ever seen it, even during the long twilights that marked the decline of the sun. He felt his hair lift as the winds descended.

            “Can you control them if you have to, Harry?” Granger asked, behind them.

            Potter lifted his hands without answering, and a dome coagulated above them, firm enough that Draco could half-see it, the way that one could see a tornado.

            Granger seemed satisfied. She went back to watching the egg hatch with more passion than any of them written on her face, and didn’t turn her head or flinch even when the original Weasel fought his way through the crowd to get to her side. Draco reckoned it was her need for new knowledge that made her feel like that, and regretted her blood. They might have got on better without it.

            Potter was stiff with outrage ahead of him. Draco touched the back of his neck and whispered, “Harry,” to make him flinch.

            Granger frowned at him and hissed something about how Draco shouldn’t do that with the bird on the edge of hatching, but Draco ignored her. He trusted in their magic to guard them from any too-bad consequence of the hatching, which meant he was loose and relaxed and alert, interested instead of afraid.

            If only life could be like this all the time.

*

            How would Malfoy like it if I prodded him all the time?

            But from the way that Malfoy’s mind shifted and oriented towards him when he thought that, Harry was convinced Malfoy would like it just fine, at least in this mood. He kept his head turned away and his winds ready and his attention concentrated on the egg, since it was all he could do.

            And the bird, and whether it would survive, and whether they would manage to feed it, was more important than the way that Malfoy could make him jump, anyway.

            The egg was changing colors, Harry saw, flushing from pale to a deep blue like the sky. Then one of the cracks stabbed deep enough to leak yolk, which was purple in color and scarlet and gold. Harry watched it pour forth and soak the ground, and wasn’t surprised when Hermione waved her wand to gather some of it up. She would try to use it as compost for their plants, knowing her, and probably for other things as well.

            Bill watched the yolk with hungry eyes. Harry thought it best to ignore him, too. He had already dominated too much of the life in the campsite since they arrived on Hurricane for Harry’s liking.

            The yolk stopped spilling at last, and another crack worked its way around the egg from top to bottom, as slowly and painstakingly as though someone was hammering on it. Then the halves at last wobbled and fell apart, slowly, and still sticking together at the very bottom, sinking into the grass.

            The chick stumbled out of the innards, took a step forwards, and opened its beak, an inarticulate shriek rumbling out. Harry jumped. The sound was louder and lower than the one its parent had produced. He hadn’t expected that.

            “It’s hungry,” Ginny said, and started fighting her way forwards, eyes narrowed as though she was watching the sun rise. “Can’t you hear that?”

            “Everyone can hear that, Weasley,” Malfoy said from behind Harry, and Harry sent him the image of a proud cat licking its own arse. Malfoy radiated silent offense back at him, and Harry was satisfied with that enough not to realize what had happened at first, that Ginny had fallen into the grass in front of the bird and was cradling the great, blind head in her arms. The beak was at least as wide as her hand.

            “Ginny,” Molly said, taking a step and then stopping as if the bird had frozen her, even though its eyes were still shut and its feathers were plastered with so much wet slickness that Harry couldn’t even make out their color yet. “What are you doing?”

            “You can’t feel it?” Ginny glared at all of them with her eyes bright, and then reached for something along her side. Harry blinked when she brought out a knife; if she was sorry for the bird, it seemed strange that she would want to hurt it.

            “Gin,” Charlie began, his voice skirling up in a way that Malfoy found amusing and Harry would have if it wasn’t Ginny.

            “This is the way it has to be done,” Ginny said, voice shaking, and then slid the knife along the side of her arm. In a second, she was as slick and wet as the bird, blood shining there, dripping and glistening, and she turned her arm further—Harry found himself thinking that her shoulder must hurt—and thrust her arm into the edge of the bird’s beak.

            The bird made a frustrated sound, head bobbing, and then opened its beak again and shot out a barbed tongue, with a dangling tip. It lapped at the blood on Ginny’s arm, and bubbled. Its head thrashed from side to side, and then Harry saw the matted feathers on the top of the head peel back and flip off to the sides.

            Its eyes opened. They were as blue as the skies of Hurricane, and they fixed on Ginny with such adoration that Malfoy shut up in the back of Harry’s head.

            Ginny shook, and gulped, and smiled, and pulled her arm away from the bird’s head. Harry thought it would shriek again, and it did, but more softly. It stood up on lurching, clumsy talons and leaned its head against Ginny’s chest. For a moment, it nipped and worried at her shirt, and then it shrieked again.

            “It’s hungry,” Ginny said, her voice softer. “I know that I can Transfigure some grass into meat, and it won’t matter what it tastes like. I think—I think the blood was the most important thing. I think it’s going to be all right.” She stood up and helped the bird up, too. Its head came to her waist. “Sorry to steal your bird, Charlie,” she added, looking at her brother, who stood there gaping at her with everyone else. “But I was the one who could feel its hunger. I think this is the way it was meant to be.”

            The bird toddled at her side as she headed off. Harry watched her go, and felt the dangerous laughter bubbling up from Malfoy in time to reach out and slam a hand over his mouth. Malfoy laughed against his skin anyway, and nipped his palm with sharp teeth. Harry found himself thinking of foxes and wolves and shook his head, turning away from the sight of Ginny and the bird to look at Charlie.

            “We won’t butcher it?” Bill asked.

            Malfoy shifted to look at him. Harry moved in response, and kept his arm firmly in place around Malfoy’s shoulders. No, he thought in response to the thoughts stabbing at him from Malfoy’s direction. I don’t happen to agree that you should be able to kill Bill because he asks a simple question.

            “We won’t be able to ride it?” Charlie asked in turn. He took a little step after Ginny, as though he thought there was some mistake, as though the bird should be his because he had lavished care on its egg.

            That is an excellent reason, Malfoy’s voice scraped and whispered.

            Harry ignored him, and spoke to Charlie instead. “Ginny might be the one who rides it, instead of you. It makes sense, in a way. She was the best flyer out of all of us—” he ignored the way that Malfoy turned his head, because the advantage that Harry had was really his wind, not talent “—and she heard its hunger in her mind. That’s a sign that this is her wild magic, isn’t it? Besides, she might let you ride it sometimes.”

            Charlie shook his head and raked a hand through his hair. He was one of the most naturally cheerful people Harry had ever known, though, and a moment later, he flashed a rueful grin. “It’s certainly a chastisement to me for being so sure that I would be the one to guide it and train it,” he muttered, and headed after Ginny.

            Harry turned to Bill.

            Bill stood there with his hands digging into his arms, the way that Malfoy would stand with his claws at the ready, and oh my, didn’t Malfoy give Harry a blast of indignation at that idea? But he shook his head when Harry moved a little closer to him. “I’m fine,” he said. His voice had less of a snarl than before. “Just puzzled.”

            “About why it chose to go to Ginny?” Harry asked gently.

            “About why we aren’t going to slaughter it.” Bill stared at him. “We need the food.”

            Harry shook his head. “If Ginny can really Transfigure the meat to feed it, then she won’t be taking any food away from the rest of us. And if we keep it and she trains it and it can hunt, then it’ll bring back a lot of food for us in the long run. That’s what we need to be thinking about, the long term, not the short term.”

            Bill snorted, and looked more like the man Harry had known, the curse-breaker with the dragon fang earring, than he had in months. “And what are we going to hunt, now that you’ve made alliance with the major source of the birds’ food?”

            Harry shrugged. “I don’t know. I think we’ll discover something else, though. The mummidade have magic of their own, and there are more birds on the planet than I thought could exist. They must hunt something else some of the time.”

            Bill nodded in a way that made Harry know he wasn’t really thinking about the answers. He was also staring beyond Harry, and when Harry turned around, he saw Fleur walking towards them, with Victoire in her arms.

            She halted in front of Bill and looked at him with calm eyes. “This eez right?” she asked, with only a trace of accent in her voice. “This eez the way that you have chosen to rejoin your family?”

            Bill swallowed. Harry couldn’t understand half the silent messages they were exchanging, but he was sure they existed, the way that the ones between him and Malfoy did. “It is.”

            (Malfoy leaned into him at the comparison and blasted his mind with heat and cold. Harry chose to ignore him. When he had constant access to Harry’s thoughts, he would have to get used to hearing unflattering things about himself along with the flattering ones, like how well he could fuck).

            Fleur smiled at Bill, and handed him his daughter. “That eez good,” she said, and accompanied him towards the center of camp for the first time since the day he had almost gone wild.

            Harry relaxed with a long sigh. There were problems to come, of course, and probably a lot of them would center on that bloody bird and the way that Ginny was hanging over it. But for now, they had the problem of Bill solved, and that was a big one.

            Light touches to the back of his neck turned him around. Malfoy stepped up to him and lowered his head. His thoughts were pointed enough that Harry braced himself for a scolding, but Malfoy said, “What are you going to do about Primrose?”

            Harry blinked, then cursed, and set out for the far side of the camp with Malfoy behind him, flowing along like a great cat.

*

            He would have died several times over so far, if not for me.

            Draco was content to hold the knowledge to himself at the moment. It wasn’t as though he had to flaunt it. Potter could feel it, from the way his shoulders hunched and his stride jerked along.

            Draco lifted his nose and tried to set Potter an example of the perfect way to walk: shoulders back, all your body dangling and flowing from those shoulders, his head tilted at the correct angle to make him look handsome. He had his reward in Potter’s needles of irritation and the way that Weasley-the-youngest looked at him as he passed by, instead of paying all her attention to her bird.

            The bond that connected him to Potter thickened when Weasley looked. Draco laughed into his ear.

            “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re the only one I want to fuck.”

            “How nice,” Potter said, turning his head from side to side as though that would bring Primrose automatically into sight. Draco knew that he had sent his winds to scout, but so far, they had brought back no word of her. “Have you considered that it might not go both ways? That I might want to fuck someone who’s not you?”

            Draco drew his claws casually up Potter’s shoulder, slitting the fabric there. Potter turned around with a slow snarl and reached for wind.

            “No,” Draco whispered to him. “You should be doing two things: searching for Primrose and asking me to use Reparo, since you can’t wield your wand for even such a simple spell anymore.”

            Potter closed his eyes and shook his head. “We have more important things to do,” he whispered, and turned around again.

            Draco sighed and followed. It was disappointing when Potter didn’t follow the script and agree with him, or ask Draco for help. There was nothing sweeter, for Draco’s new definition of that word, than for Potter to yield to him while still spitting and snarling on the surface and proclaiming that he would never yield.

            Draco blinked when he thought that.

            That’s what I really want. Not so much the fucking—although that’s nice—as the yielding. If Potter asked someone else for help on a regular basis, if he gave in to what people requested of him, then I would kill him.

            Draco nodded. That was it, then, another reason to detach Potter from leading the Weasel pack. Draco hated to watch him give in. A pliant, compliant Potter was a treasure that only Draco deserved.

            “There she is,” Potter said, and broke into a sprint. “Stop thinking about perverted things and follow me.”

            Draco thought they could have had an interesting discussion on the meaning of perversion, but if Potter had located Primrose, then Draco wanted to see what he would do. So he followed, never panting or seeming tired, because that would have undermined Potter’s confidence in him.

            Potter’s thoughts bounced back towards him, furious and roiling and so formless that Draco didn’t catch a sense of words. He smiled serenely into the distance and kept running.

            They reached the top of the hills around the encampment, and Draco saw Primrose, walking away across the grass. She didn’t carry anything that she hadn’t arrived with, he saw by looking up and down her robes, unless she had stuffed some seeds into a pocket. And even then, they would be useless to her without Granger’s knowledge and Harry’s ability to take them up into the winds.

            “Hetty!” Potter called, which, with an effort, Draco remembered was Primrose’s first name. Potter slipped and slithered down the hill towards her. Primrose must have heard him, with his winds directing the sound, but she didn’t turn around.

            Draco touched Potter’s shoulder once he had reached the bottom of the hill. “If she’s that determined to leave, you might as well let her,” he murmured.

            Potter shook him off and continued running. “Hetty!” he called again, and finally the woman turned around to face him.

            Her face was so tear-streaked that Draco felt his eyebrows rise. Had the hatching of the bird been enough to carry her back in time to the destruction of her people? Perhaps so. In that case, Draco was glad that she was leaving. They had enough fissures and weaknesses running through their group.

            Potter shifted in irritation, but said nothing. Primrose was the one who whispered, “I can’t. I saw the way that—that Ginny soothed the bird, and made it responsible to her. But I can’t live in the same place as one of those predators and the way it’ll look when it grows up. I can’t,” she finished, sobbing so hard that Draco thought she didn’t notice how ungrammatical her speech had become.

            “If Ginny is in control of it, then it won’t attack you in the same way,” Potter said gently. “You’ll never have to fear that.”



“But will it look different?” Primrose shook tangles of hair out of the way, and some more tears, and glared at him. “That’s the thing that makes me frightened, and it’s the thing that you can’t promise will change.”

“No, I can’t,” Potter said, gazing at her with a melting expression that made Draco wonder if he would have to do something about it. Because Potter could not look like that, and then pretend that he only cared about what Draco said and thought.

That was never true, Potter snarled in the back of his mind, even while he physically put his arm around Primrose and tugged her against him. She sagged there, weeping. Potter smoothed her hair and glared at Draco as though he assumed Draco should somehow do the same thing.

Draco shook his head and stood back. He thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Primrose had been aware that they had the egg for nearly as long as she had been in the camp. And how would she survive on her own? She apparently preferred death to being frightened, while Draco thought she should live with the fear and conquer it. That was what he had done with his fear of the Dark Lord.

You didn’t have any choice, Potter’s reply came back, as sharp as an arrowhead. Hurricane is supposed to be about choices.

            Draco coughed into his sleeve so that he wouldn’t laugh. Of course Potter would say something like that, when a short time ago he had been reminding the Weasleys of facts and the way that they had to adapt to what Hurricane brought them, since they had chosen to come here and couldn’t go back.

            Potter ignored him once more, and whispered, “Hetty. Do you think you could get used to it, if you were to stay? You would never have to see the bird, never interact with it. If you just remained on the far side of the camp from the place where Ginny will train it—”

            “I would still see it in the air.” Primrose’s tears seemed to be done with, and she stepped away from Potter, bony arms folded. “I would still feel its shadow, and know what it could do to me if it got out of control.”

            Potter sighed soundlessly. “You don’t know where anyone else is, though. It was pure chance that you found us in the first place. How do you know that you’ll find anyone else if you start walking across the plains?”

            Primrose shook her head, which wasn’t the same as an answer, Draco noted. But Potter seemed to sense that it was impossible to argue with someone so chattering and overwhelmed, and he touched her forehead a final time, and let her go.

            “Let us at least give you some food,” Potter said. “Some of the boiled grass, seeds, those cakes that Ginny made last night—”

            Primrose smiled a little. “No, thank you. I have food that I’ve made myself, and one of those rabbit-like creatures that I killed. I don’t want the others to blame you because you’ve tried to be kind to me. I think the blame of this one is enough.” She gave Draco the kind of glance that made him blink, because it was infused with bitter steel he could almost respect.

            “I don’t blame you as much now,” Draco said.

            But Primrose, bitterly strong or not, was still too weak to understand him, as she proved when she stared blankly at him and then turned to Potter. “I don’t want you to be blamed for what you’re doing to help me, either,” she said.

            Potter shrugged. “I know that. But—what do you mean, one of the rabbit-like creatures?” Suddenly he was standing tall and staring back at Primrose. “We haven’t seen anything that looks like rabbits.”

            Primrose blinked back at him, then said, “Since you’re going to be good enough to let me go and not convince me to stay, then I might as well show you the warren I found.” She turned and strode into the thick grass. Potter followed her, his winds bending down the grass so that they could have an easier time of it. Primrose nodded back at him once and kept walking.

            Draco followed, because he was curious and because Potter’s mind brewed with emotions that might lead him to touch Primrose again.

            I’m not yours, Potter’s voice told him, thick with frustration.

            You’re as much mine as I am yours.

            Potter felt comprehensively silent. Draco smiled at the sky, gestured with his claws back and forth, and thought that life had never been sweeter.

*

            moodysavage: Good guess!
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Reap the Hurricane