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Here to Live and Die	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 5833 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
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Chapter List
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Chapter Nineteen—Full-Blown Power
            It is coming.
            Harry winced a little as the words slammed into his brain. Westshadow had set up the communication bond between Harry and Draco and Open Wings again, since Nuisance was still gone. Open Wings spoke with a force that made Harry felt as if a punch had rocked his head back on his neck.
            I know, he said back. But I still find it hard to estimate how much time we have before it arrives. Is there any way that you can tell me?
            Swoop shifted and clawed the ground, as if he disliked the way Harry was speaking. Open Wings scratched behind his ears and glanced at Harry calmly. He was standing mostly on the earth, but leaning against his beast, as if he would mount him and spiral up into the sky at any second. Draco brushed Harry’s shoulder with a hand, and Harry relaxed, reminded that he had a partner and the ability to fly himself, if he wanted them.
            The storms turn, said Open Wings. They go faster sometimes, retreat at others. There were a few summers years ago where the meadow received nothing but the mildest of rain. I do not think that will happen this time.
            Harry grimaced and nodded. Whether it was the destruction of Bodiless and the release of the wild magic that had formed Nuisance along with so many other creatures or not, he could feel the pulse of power building in the distance. It was aimed straight at the center of the meadow, like a pointer on a sundial. But that didn’t help him with knowing exactly when it would arrive, or what would happen once it did.
            We will send scouts north, Open Wings said. Now his hand was a bit firmer on Swoop’s neck, and Harry was sure that he intended to be one of those scouts, at least for a while. I ask that you honor their reports and act the instant you receive them.
            Harry nodded again. He would do nothing less. If he had any advance warning of the storm changing direction and power, then he would be able to save more people, and maybe also the greenhouses and plants that Hermione worried about.
            Open Wings paused once more, gazing at him. He had clacked his beak open, and now he spread his talon-fingers in Harry’s direction as though inviting someone else to look at him. No other rider was part of this particular conversation, though, and Westshadow and Draco already knew where Harry stood perfectly well, so Harry wasn’t sure who the audience for that gesture was supposed to be.
            Do the best you can, Open Wings said. We could go elsewhere and start over if we had to, but I do not think your humans and the mummidade would like to leave.
            Harry folded his arms. I wouldn’t want you to have to leave, either.
            Open Wings clacked his beak once more, as close as he could probably come to a smile, Harry thought, and turned, leaping onto his beast. Swoop didn’t even wait for the breaking of the bond, although he didn’t have to be on the ground for the mummidade to break it. He leaped upwards, and his wings beat faster than Harry’s winds, or so it seemed to Harry. He was a dot far away, a blur against cloud, by the time that Harry was no longer feeling the pressure of their minds.
            All four of Westshadow’s bodies turned to consider Harry, and Harry winced a little. Looking into their golden eyes was almost worse than being the focus of the riders’ hope.
            We helped you to kill Bodiless, said Westshadow. But I do not think that we can help you turn the storm. The power over the winds and the gateway is yours, and we are not as intimately linked to them as you are.
            Harry nodded again. He felt Draco press firmly, fiercely, against his back. He knew that Draco would come up into the storm with him if Harry asked, leaving Jeremy in Andromeda’s care, the way he was now.
            But Harry reached back and squeezed Draco’s hand. He would have Draco come up with him only if things got really bad. He hoped that now he had some idea of how bad the storms could be, he would judge them better, instead of just flinging himself into this one as he had into the one that had come before and hoping for the best.
            Draco snorted behind him, both of them wincing simultaneously as Westshadow released the bond that had tied them together with the mummidade and broke apart, its bodies trotting in different directions to rejoin the herd. This storm is going to be more powerful than the one you faced, and not like one you called up, either. You really think that you’re going to do better against it than the others?
            Harry twisted around to stare at him. Of course, he said. You have to think the same thing, or at least that you cured me of taking stupid risks, or why would you be standing here and calmly discussing my going up against it?
            Draco’s hand tightened on his elbow for a moment. I’ve accepted that this is necessary. That doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.
            Harry kissed him, not sure what else he could say. Draco raised his hands and clenched them into place on either side of Harry’s temples.
            “Just don’t disappoint me,” Draco breathed into his mouth. “Don’t—let me go, don’t give up, don’t act as though the storm is too powerful for you when you know it’s not and you have to come back to me and Jeremy early when you could stay and fight.”
            Harry blinked at him, thinking that those were sort of silly things to worry about, and then smiled and nodded. Draco was talking about things that he didn’t think would happen to distract himself from the possibilities of what could.
            Draco snarled at him and leaned his head against Harry’s chest. Sometimes I wish that you weren’t so smart.
            But you love me, really, Harry said, and stroked his hand through the thickest part of Draco’s hair.
            Do you think I would put up with this if I didn’t? I might have tried going back through the gate to Earth myself if we hadn’t bonded.
            Harry kissed his cheek quietly, and said nothing. He knew that Draco would probably blow up if he did.
*
            The storm came on a night when Harry had been up rocking Jeremy and Draco had been drifting in and out of sleep, sometimes soothed by the hushing he could hear Harry doing to calm Jeremy, sometimes distracted and awakened by the thoughts that he could feel pouring through the bond.
            And then Harry’s thoughts were harsh and cool, and Draco rolled over and opened his eyes. Harry smiled at him, silent and determined, and placed Jeremy into his arms.
            “Stay alert,” he whispered aloud, even though the words made Jeremy stir and he could just as easily have said them down the bond. “I don’t know how long this will last or how hard it’ll be, but you may have to move into one of the silver houses.”
            He hesitated one more time, and then spoke into Draco’s mind just as Jeremy began to fuss. And I think that I may have to draw on your strength to fight the storm, the way I did once before.
            Draco took his hand and squeezed once, hard. Then Harry leaned in and they shared a kiss, a little shorter than it would have been without Jeremy’s steadily building cries. Harry turned to the tent flap.
            A few seconds later, he was gone, kicking himself into the wind and the sky as fast as a spider crawling up a wall.
            Draco closed his eyes and sat there with Jeremy cradled to his chest, as soft and warm as he could wish for, if not as soothing. It would be for the best only if Harry was with them.
            Then he stood up and began preparing to move to the largest house Andromeda had created, along with all the others. He didn’t want to worry about it later, if the storm changed course and they had to run, and he didn’t want Harry to worry about them. And it was a way to keep from feeling helpless, too. Collecting Jeremy’s bottle and nappies and the few glittering toys that impressed him was something he could do.
            Harry’s thoughts slid down the bond, a fast caress.
            I love you.
*
            Among the clouds, Harry could feel the power better.
            It extended from the ground to the sky, this wild magic, this roaring and dancing strength that he had no idea how to fight. He felt that he could lose himself to the cyclones and the whirlwinds of it, let himself be swept away, and he might never regret it. There was still something in him that aspired to go to the wild, to venture away from the others, as Draco had once suggested doing, and flying away across Hurricane to see what they could find.
            But they had Teddy, and now Jeremy. Harry thought their children should grow up with the rest of the humans, at least in their childhood. Maybe when they were older, Harry and Draco could answer some of that call’s power in the distance.
            The air in front of him turned grey and rippled, and Harry shook his head hard, reminding himself that he was in the middle of a storm right now, and could put aside ambitions for the future until he had survived it.
            You will.
            Draco’s assurance was strong and quiet in the back of his mind. Harry drew on that for strength as he knew he might have to draw on Draco’s magical core while he spiraled, higher and higher, into the blueness, and the blackness that was closing in behind that.
            The clouds were thicker here, and the air colder. Harry shivered as some winds wisped past his skin. They weren’t the normal winds born of the wild magic, but exhalations of the power that had come to oppose him.
            Yet it wasn’t sentient. Harry was sure of that. Or at least, not in the same way Bodiless had been sentient, capable of looking ahead and realizing that Harry and Draco and the others might be able to harm it. This storm just wanted to move, and it wouldn’t turn away or aside from its path either to harm people or to benefit them. It would just blow until it had blown itself out.
            Or it would if Harry wasn’t there to oppose it.
            Harry spread his arms and began to whirl in place, shivering as he did so. He was sure that this wasn’t the best way to go about it, and someone with more knowledge of the wild magic might criticize him for it. But at the moment, he was the one with the best knowledge of the wild magic. Even the riders, who had lived here for so much longer than the humans, had only been able to bow their heads and endure when it came to the storms.
            The magic that he called came out of his core, the same power he would have used once to fuel spells through his wand. The winds that sped past him turned towards him instead now, and some of them trembled and veered aside from their true course. Harry drew them in and made them harmless. He wondered for a second if it was possible that he could weaken the storm this way, little by little. After all, every little wind that he removed from its course was one that wouldn’t blow down the grass or the silver houses, or break the wings of the riders’ beasts.
            But the storm answered his stupid speculations in the next moment, and it did it with lightning.
            Lightning like Harry had never seen, so fast and so bright that he found himself gaping as he watched it. Lightning that spiraled around Harry and broke away in glittering blue-yellow bursts of brilliance, dancing in front of Harry like splintered stars. Harry knew the impulse behind it. The storm was flaunting its power, telling him that he couldn’t control it, that it was free and would do whatever it wanted.
            The storm did not have consciousness, but it had something that was close enough to it for Harry to have to deal with. He realized that he was smiling as he held up his fists and channeled his answer through them.
            The wind blew out and apart with a sharp crack, shredding the air where the lightning had been. Harry might not be able to turn the storm aside, but he could hope to mimic and impress it, give it a show that would make it think twice. He called the wind back to him and lifted his arms higher, pointing them ahead of him, to make himself more streamlined, like a dolphin cutting through the sea.
            The winds caught him, and flung him.
            Harry was pinwheeling through the sky faster than he had ever done, even during the conjured storm when he had fought Primrose. He was falling upwards, he was falling downwards, he was everywhere at once. He didn’t know where he was in relation to the ground, except that thick grey clouds surrounded him, and he thought they were more likely to be high than near the earth. He gave himself over to the wind and let it do with him as it would.
            It pranced around with him, jagged waves lapping against his body and billowing his clothes. Harry laughed aloud as it turned him over and over like someone examining a prize. It wanted to show him off to the storm the way Harry had wanted to show off his power. Who was doing it with whom, here?
            Around and around and around, faster and faster and faster, he spun. Harry knew that he should have been dizzy by now, should have vomited. If he was spinning around on the earth, maybe he would be.
            But here he was cocooned in his magic, and he trusted it. Even when it carried him in a direction he knew, knew with the pulse of his heart and the trembling of his bones, was higher, he relaxed and let it do so. He wouldn’t die of the cold up here, or of the sheer height, or of any predatory beast they didn’t know about that might haunt the skies of Hurricane. Hurricane was alien, or had been, but now it was home. How could he and Draco have danced Jeremy into being if it wasn’t?
            The winds dropped away beneath him briefly, letting him fall, but then made a flat, invisible carpet. Harry dropped down onto it and reclined. He looked around curiously, wondering where they had brought him that they had wanted to stop flying.
            It seemed to be a clearing in the sky. Harry thought the “carpet” he was on stretched for a much greater length than he could see, but it seemed to be anchored on either side against great fluffy clouds that bulged and rippled like trees tossing on the ground. The light that spread around him was diffused, moons and stars shining somewhere, but beyond the grey. Given the colors around Harry, it filled that clear space of air with a faint blue-silver glow, as if Harry was standing in the middle of a silversmith’s forge.
            Something trembled behind him.
            Still sprawled on his side, Harry rolled over to see what it was.
            The storm came to him.
            To his eyes, it seemed like nothing but another black cloud, softer and fluffier than the rest, maybe, moving against the wind, with here and there a spark of electricity in it, and maybe the fuzziness of rain and mist. But his eyes weren’t the important things here. The storm had no eyes, but Harry knew without asking that it perceived him.
            What he could feel…
            Harry caught his breath, and found it difficult to keep breathing. He stayed with his eyes locked on the cloud until his lungs had enough and forced himself to breathe by moving of their own free will. He stretched out his hand to the black cloud, but it fell down beside him again, and he could do nothing but lie there and gaze.
            What he could feel was like lightning to the nerves. Power that played with every molecule of his body. He knew the storm could take him apart, but it was threaded through and around him at the moment the way it was with the other clouds, with the knot of wild magic in the sky, and that didn’t mean much. It was like saying the storm could blow over trees. Yes, it could, but that wasn’t the most important manifestation of its power.
            And the cloud-form wasn’t, either. What was important was the fact that it hovered here in front of him, and focused on him, instead of running away somewhere. Harry knew that even its fringes were still at the moment, pouring rain down on the same mountain slopes or boulders or whatever else lay north of the meadow. It wouldn’t advance until it decided what to do about him, got some answers.
            Harry stretched out his hands again, ready to scoop the cloud from the air if it would come to him. He couldn’t contain its vast magic, of course. It contained and scooped him and more than half the northern sky. But he could hold the visible manifestation it had chosen to send to him, if it wanted.
            The storm paused, the magic stirring and singing in his blood, making waves and tides. Then it slipped forwards, the brightest and darkest thing Harry had ever beheld, and nestled inside his arms, close to his chest.
            It felt like cold. It felt like height, and the sky that Harry knew waited all around him, outside these temporary walls of brightness and darkness.
            It felt like life.
            Shaking a little from the intense delight that filled him, Harry lounged back again on the wind carpet that supported him. It gave beneath him, sank, and he floated gently on a continuously flowing breeze of air that might have been the breath of the storm.
            The magic was still all around him, and it was as wild as ever. Harry knew that the cloud coming to him like this didn’t mean it had become tame. It was as wild as Nuisance, as the Tssisid, as the birds and the flying shark that he and Draco had met in the ocean.
            But the difference was, now he held it, and it held him, and cradled him back, and he was showing the storm that it could partner with something, instead of destroying everything because it wasn’t the storm. Now it had a companion, someone else who understood what it was like to fly without wings.
            The storm had known nothing of similarity before now, Harry decided, the knowledge feeding into him like the power, only it and not-it, different and itself. Now it swept through Harry, sipping at the thoughts in his head, understanding them in the same way that Nuisance did, and making them part of itself.
            It was not alone.
            The cloud in Harry’s arms dissolved, and it began to play with him.
            Harry leaned back and let his arms flop open, laughing as the wind swept his head back and ruffled his hair and tossed him from one giant invisible hand to the other. He knew that showing fear or anger now would only upset the storm; possibly it would even drive it back into the intense sulkiness that came from knowing it was alone in the world, and Harry didn’t want that.
            It helped that he was genuinely not afraid. It was like being aloft on a broom. He knew he could fly, he knew he was good at it, and he knew that the lack of perfect control was part of the point. He would act to save himself if he had to. But until he had to, it was bliss, being flung about like this. It was joy.
            He loved it.
            The storm purred like a giant kitten and wrapped around him. Harry held out a hand, and a breeze blew through his fingers, rubbing against his palm. Harry turned his head, and the storm was there on lips and face like a kiss.
            What about me?
            Harry started violently. He had forgotten Draco, for longer than he ever had since they formed the bond, and certainly since they had had Jeremy. But now he could feel the bond, like an iron nail through his skull, binding him to the ground.
            And the storm growled around him, displeased at the notion that Harry might drop away from it and back to the earth.
            But you are temporary, Harry sang to the lightning that swirled around him a second later, and the rain that swooped from all corners of the sky to soak his face and hair. I’ll last longer than you will. You were made to blaze in glory and then disappear, and change. Your winds will go somewhere else, and your rain will be absorbed by the ground and the ocean, and your thunder will be heard, and your lightning will be seen. You weren’t meant to last forever. I live longer.
            He gasped a moment later as the storm swept through him again. This time, it was intense pleasure in the notion. It hadn’t known what would happen to it, unable to think of not-existing any more than it had been able to understand that there might be something out there like it.
            And Harry held the bond now, held the existence of Draco and Jeremy and showed them to the storm. They weren’t a nail through his skull binding him to the earth; they were people like him that he wanted to spend time with.
            It took the storm a bit to work through that, but then it understood. If Harry was like it, and Draco and Jeremy were like Harry, then they were like the storm, too.
            And it didn’t want to hurt them.
            The storm turned. Harry felt it wheeling, all the immense leading edges of rain whirling like skirts, the clouds folding back, the lightning striking into the air. The storm would still fall on the meadow, but it would go and blow itself out over the ocean more quickly, so it could become all the things that Harry had told it that it would be.
            It let Harry go.
            Harry drifted back to earth, swirling back and forth like a leaf, exhausted. He saw a few riders flying beside him, and smiled. If he needed to be picked up, then they would do it.
            But in the meantime…
            In the meantime, he tossed his head back and watched the storm going, curling back gently, its bright whips of power fading from him, an experience never to be forgotten, but which had to pass.
            It had left its own gift with him. Harry knew he would never fear a storm on Hurricane again.
            Maybe he wouldn’t be able to turn them aside exactly the same way, but he would go to them in glory and in beauty and in power and in confidence. That was the way to handle them—the way he had courted Draco, the way he and Draco had danced Jeremy into being.
            In glory.
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Here to Live and Die