Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

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 Twenty-One—Making Peace

            This time, when he opened his eyes to see one of the giant creatures crouching beside the campfire and regarding them, Draco didn’t immediately wake Harry or reach for his magic. He looked carefully, and now he thought he could see the rider standing beside the creature, although so small that it was dwarfed by one of the paws. Its claws rested on the creature’s side, and its beak and bird-face showed plainly.

            They had continued flying north across the plain yesterday, with the intention of turning northwest as soon as they could to come up on the volcano. They had seen no more beasts or riders, although Draco was inclined to treat the haunch of antelope the rider above them had dropped as a peace offering, the same as Harry was.

            But there was a large difference between a solitary peace offering, and this, particularly when they weren’t sure that the rider who had dropped the haunch was the same one watching them now.

            Draco sat up. The rider pressed closer to the beast, but didn’t take off. The beast opened its mouth, but didn’t snarl or screech.

            Harry woke up when Draco touched his mind, of course, and when he sat up, the rider did move. It spread its claws and crouched down, head tilted at an awkward angle. Draco stared. He supposed it might be a submissive gesture, but he knew little about the submissive gestures that birds, as opposed to mammals, used with each other.

            Do we approach it? Harry asked him.

            Draco couldn’t stifle the burst of pleasure that came from Harry asking him instead of just acting on his own, and from his wry grimace in Draco’s direction, Harry knew it, but he still didn’t move. Draco inclined his head. A little, I think. We can take the rabbit meat that’s left from last night with us.

            Harry nodded once, and they both rose to their feet. The rider crouched down further, but kept on studying them, staring. Draco found it hard to read those hard black eyes, rimmed with gold, but he reckoned they might as great a curiosity to the creature as it was to them. If they had curiosity, if they were sentient, and bringing the haunch suggested they were.

            Draco was the one to hold up the rabbit meat, because any threatening gesture from Harry right now would probably cause panic. He waited until the rider and the beast were both staring, and then tossed it in their direction.

            The beast snapped out its neck and scooped the food out of midair, swallowing without appearing to chew. The rider watched it, then laid its hand on the neck of its beast and rose up. Squinting, Draco thought he could make out straps lashed around the beast’s chest and neck, leading up to a saddle in the natural hollow between the wings, where the rider climbed up and stared down on them in silence.

            Draco didn’t like being forced to look up, but he had Harry at his side, and the rider had either been part of the group Harry had battled yesterday or been told about them. He looked back mildly, and thought for a moment that the rider bobbed its beak at them, as if satisfied of something.

            Then the beast spread its wings, and Draco hastily stepped back out of range. The winds that Harry had strung around the camp raced over to him and supported him against the downdraft. The rider watched them both as the beast rose and rose, apparently without much tugging on the reins, and turned north.

            They watched together as it sped north, faster than its own flickering shadow on the grass. Then Harry sighed. “I didn’t fuck up everything after all,” he said.

            “No,” Draco said. “But I wish that we had some way to communicate with them besides food gifts. They’ve already given us one, we’ve given them one. I don’t know what else there is left to do or say with them.”

            “We’ll come up with a way.”

            Good to hear you saying “we,” Draco told him, as they turned to wake Harry’s friends and face the day.

            It’s the only thing I can say, Harry said, and caught Draco’s hand, and squeezed it, filling Draco with enough harsh joy that he thought he might scream like the riders’ beasts. He contented himself with a slow, regal nod, and a squeeze back.

*

            The grass grew greener and greener the further north they went, but Harry still saw nothing of any cities.

            Well, perhaps the riders didn’t need them, as Draco pointed out when Harry touched his mind through the bond. They had the ability to hunt on their beasts, and they might live in the mountains as easily as on the plains. Perhaps the plains were only their way of getting food, and they stayed in the mountains the rest of the time.

            Harry would have liked to believe that, as it would have made it easier to move the camp here, but he didn’t think the riders would have defended their territory so fiercely otherwise. It was a puzzle, and it didn’t get any easier as they reached the point where they would have to turn to reach the volcano.

            Harry.

            Draco’s voice was queer, and quivered through the bond. Harry glanced at him. His face was pale, but a quick scan of the grass and the mountains didn’t reveal to Harry what was troubling him. What? he demanded.

            I can hear the call again.

            Harry promptly turned his head in the direction where he knew the smoke-shrouded mountain lay, but no matter how hard he listened, there was nothing there, no plucking at his thoughts or his wild magic. Perhaps the enemy had decided to focus on Draco because he was the one who had been making the plans lately, or because his wild magic was weaker.

            Oh, thank you so very much, Draco snarled in his head, sounding much more like himself. Just because I didn’t swing anyone around and almost crash them into the ground yesterday doesn’t mean that I can’t wreak damage. Or who destroyed that bird and the snake-shark? You helped me, but I shredded them.

            Harry nodded. But does Bodiless—assuming this is Bodiless—know that? I don’t know if it can access our memories, or only create a call that somehow reaches out and taps into our deepest desires.

            Draco opened his mouth to respond, and suddenly stopped. He was hanging in midair, despite the winds that tried to tug him forwards, and his mouth was slowly opening. He looked like someone taking in a giant spoon full of some food he hated.

            Harry spun towards him—and Draco shot away from the rest of the group in the direction of the smoky mountain, as though catapulted.

            Draco!

            The rage that broke through Harry made the battle-madness that he’d suffered when he was trying to stop the riders and their beasts yesterday look like nothing. He broke away after Draco with a speed that surprised even him, the winds sweeping him up an along as though he had wings.

            As fast as he flew, the force that had snatched Draco was faster. Draco was fading in front of him, and Harry could feel the bond growing fainter as well, as though the threads of wild magic that had made it in the first place were unraveling one by one. Perhaps Bodiless was taking Draco’s power from him.

            Harry took a deep breath, and held it, and hammered it through himself, changing his thoughts into convictions. No, he was not going to believe something like that. Draco’s magic was his, and no one could take it from him.

            But they had never precisely understood how the bond between them had come into being, and perhaps it was possible to attack and unravel that, or block it in the same way that Bodiless had blocked them from feeling the calls it sent out to each of them.

            Harry plunged into the middle of the bond and held firm there, sending his magic—not his wild magic, the other power in his body, coupled with the will that had driven him to walk into the Forbidden Forest—surging along it. He believed in the bond, he wanted it, he willed it, and he would spend himself recklessly to maintain it. It was not going to be something that the idiotic Bodiless succeeded in taking away from him.

            Because it wasn’t.

            “Harry!”

            The calls came from behind him, and Harry imagined how alarming it must be for Ron and Hermione to see him diving away from them like that, while they remained helpless in their chairs of wind. He sent a command to some of the winds around him to go back and escort his friends safely to the ground. If he was lost in going after Draco, then at least they would be safe, in a way, and they might be able to get back to the camp if the riders would take him.

            Right now, Harry had to worry about what was in front of him, not an event far away in the future.

            He dived after Draco.

*

            Draco could feel the wind whispering to him, but it seemed to him as though he was drugged and listening, and the whispering happened somewhere outside his head. Not inside it, anyway. Inside his head, he was alert and restless and waiting for something else to happen, perhaps for Harry to come and get him.

            But outside, he could hear the wind telling him tales of power, promising him that it could reach out and give him the same magic he had admired in Harry, no, the magic he had envied in Harry, that it could make him the strongest wizard in the camp, that he could overrule others with a glance if he wanted to. He could toss Harry around the way Harry had tossed him around yesterday. He could be the strongest, the one who carried out his wishes, the way he had dreamed.

            Did he want to perform the ritual that the mummid by the sea had done to call a child into existence? Then he should be able to do it. He would have to have Harry help him, but he could command Harry with the magic he would have now. Harry’s odd ideas about Teddy being jealous or not wanting a sibling would mean nothing.

            Did he want his properties on Earth back? He would be able to reach through the gate and tear the wizarding world apart. He would be able to do anything he wanted, be anything he wanted, making someone do anything he wanted.

            Draco bowed his head and panted. Sometimes he felt as though he was thinking those thoughts, and then again as though someone else was thinking them through him. He wondered if this was a sign that he was in Bodiless’s power. But the mummid hadn’t described anything like this, only the birds coming down on them out of season.

            They never came far enough north to hear me. They never came far enough north to appreciate me.

            Draco lifted his streaming eyes, and found himself near the smoking mountain. This close, though, he could see what the smoke concealed. He could look down into a hollow valley with its mountain missing, the way they had seen as they came north, and found Bodiless looking back at him.

            It was pure, raw magic, pure, raw power. It drove past Draco’s eyes and into his brain, and what was important was his impression of it, not what he saw. He knew that this was the call, and it knew him and cradled him and observed his desires. It spoke in his head, where the bond with Harry had been, and whispered and shouted at once.

            Power. That is all that matters, the magic, becoming the magic, being the magic.

            Draco’s hands reached out to it. He knew it couldn’t literally be so, but the voice that sang to him was the voice of the deepest truth he had known all his life, the truth he had known on Earth, the truth he had known and wanted to shout at Harry for ignoring, when Harry could do anything he wanted with his magic.

            Harry could have stayed in the wizarding world and changed everything. Someone with that much wild magic would have no equal. He could have forced the Ministry to stop persecuting the Weasleys and him. He could have protected Teddy. He could have come to Draco and taken what he wanted.

            He had no reason to want it, then.

            The voice was faint and far away, though, and the truth was bugling in Draco’s head. The Ministry’s divisions were wrong, stupid, the division into “normal” magic and Dark Arts. What mattered was what you did, not your intentions with it. And you could harm someone with a Light spell and save them with a Dark spell.

            Power was what mattered.

            A soft sound rolled around him, a sound like an earthquake laughing. Draco still reached out, and the heart of that power beat in front of him, the greatest power on Hurricane, the power that would always outrank all the others. On Earth, Harry could have been a god. On Hurricane, he could be nothing but a god’s favored servant.

            As Draco would be, if he took the power that Bodiless chose to offer him.

            Draco drew his head back, and with it his breath, and with it his hands, and with them his will. He hovered there, held by magic, cradled by desire, and he knew that Bodiless watched him from below, without body and without eyes.

            He didn’t want to be someone else’s servant. That subservient position was not what he wanted the ultimate magic for.

            The magic around him purred and roared forth. This was the heart of Hurricane, the source of all its winds, all the power carried on them. The power around him that understood no second best, that did not want a subservient position, either, and would take away anyone who tried to make that claim.

            Take away. The way it called me here, and tried to call Granger and Harry. Maybe the way it called the creatures that lived in the ruins beside the silver ovals, whatever or whoever they were.

            Draco shook his head. He would never yield to something like this. The dreams of unimaginable strength it gave him were the things it wanted, and it disproved its own ability to grant wishes even as it offered them, because it couldn’t grant his ultimate one. He turned his head away from Bodiless and sniffed his disapproval.

            The sound around him went silent. Then the call redoubled, spinning through his body in great ripples, overlapping with another call that echoed from the back of his mind, the dreams that Bodiless had said he could have, the images of magic and what he could do with it, the bond that—

            The bond that connected him to Harry. Draco had almost forgotten it in the pressure of decisions and wishes that congealed around him, but the bond was there, and now Draco could feel it, changing, growing.

            That meant Harry was coming closer. Draco couldn’t prevent the thought from darting across his mind, and damned himself for it. What he knew, Bodiless would know. If he wanted Harry’s attack to be a surprise, he should have kept himself from thinking about it.

            But a few seconds later, he knew that was impossible. Winds buffeted the cradle of air that held him, and made it sway back and forth, so that for a few sickening moments Draco was back in the fight yesterday where Harry had bound him up in the sky while he fought the riders. And more winds came and coiled around him, and yanked against the hold Bodiless had on him, although Draco knew it was impossible for him to free him, because Bodiless was so much stronger.

            Harry was coming.

            Of course he is. He’ll attack in a doomed last charge, the way he’s good at, and think that he’s doing something grand and noble, because that’s also the way Gryffindors think, and he never stopped being a Gryffindor in his heart, where it counts.

            Tears starting to life in his eyes from despair and the pressure of the winds, Draco felt himself turn to face Harry’s approach. It was Bodiless who turned him, or perhaps the winds coming from Harry, or the purchase that Bodiless allowed them to have on Draco. Because it was Bodiless that was allowing this, all of it. It could have held Harry away with a wall of wind, and forced him to watch as it destroyed Draco.

            The call had ceased. Draco could do nothing but hang there, and watch as Harry hurled himself at a foe too strong for him to destroy, a foe who could turn his winds against him—although when Draco tried to call that down the bond to Harry, he found his words blocked by an enormous wall.

            Of course I do. Of course Bodiless would never allow anything to happen that could actually give Harry a chance at survival.

            We should have stayed on Earth.

*

            Harry found it hard to see what was ahead of him. Churning purple and grey smoke, yes, like the plume that had outlined the mountains ahead of him for so long. And a shifting haze that he realized, when the hairs on his arms and the nape of his neck began to rise, must be made of pure magical power.

            But he could see Draco, hanging in the middle of all that and blazing like a beacon. He knew it was a taunt, a challenge, that Draco was the prey and meant to summon him. But he couldn’t slow down for all that. So what? He had faced enemies before, overwhelming odds that no one thought he could beat, and he had won.

            This isn’t Voldemort, said a voice in the back of his mind that sounded like Draco’s, although Harry had heard nothing from Draco down the bond since Bodiless had snatched him away. It’s something much stronger, and greater, and older.

            Harry knew that, but he threw the knowledge away. That might be true, but it didn’t lessen his need to rescue Draco, to have him back at his side. As long as Bodiless held Draco, Harry would come for him.

            Bodiless waited until Harry was above one of the mountains that looked most real, a hillock of grey and white stone. And then it unleashed a hammer of wind that slammed into Harry and sent him reeling over and over again.

            Harry couldn’t breathe. The wind filled his lungs and snatched the air he had got so used to commanding away. It laughed and roared in his ears, and he knew that he could fall, and he would be as vulnerable to a storm now as any other creature on Hurricane.

            Then he did begin to fall.

            Harry turned his head upwards, because if he was going to die than he wanted Draco to be his last sight, and stretched out his hand. His mind was full of Teddy, and his friends, who might be drawn here next, but his eyes were full of Draco, and his surging power reached out towards the bond. Perhaps he could touch Draco one more time before he died. It might amuse Bodiless to allow that, in fact.

            The bond formed up between them, firmed, as Harry concentrated on it. And then Draco’s voice came singing along it, harsh and strained.

            What are you doing? You know it controls things. You know that you’re going to die.

            It was probably only the speed of thought that allowed that comment of Draco’s to reach him before he hit, Harry thought. Either that, or Bodiless had tossed him higher than he knew and was controlling the fall to make it hurt more. He answered anyway. But die looking at you. That makes it worth it.

            Draco seemed to grow closer to him, though doubtless that was only the air hammering in his brain and the consciousness leaving him. Harry reached out one dreamy hand, ready to caress Draco’s face and touch his hair a last time.

            Winds snared his hand, dragged it back to his side, and flung him upwards again. Harry had been right. This fall was under the control of Bodiless, and it would only let him die when it wanted to.

            When it thinks I learned my lesson?

            That would be never.

            They were speaking, and at least Harry knew that Draco was saying what he wished to, even if those words only came through because Bodiless wished them to. Their minds were free and open, feeding into each other’s, and as Bodiless hauled Harry up and hung him in front of Draco, their eyes met.

            Draco concentrated on the bond and said, Listen. I wanted to tell you something. And magic and emotion came flooding along it, so much and so many that Harry couldn’t separate them and be sure what Draco’s message was, but he thought he knew. He reached out a hand, and Bodiless dragged it back to his side again.

            I want to tell you something back, he said, and pushed love at Draco, all he could feel right now, surpassing even the fear and the rage that made him want to fight Bodiless.

            Draco’s eyes met his again, and there was such wonder in his face that Harry wanted to weep. It said what they could have enjoyed together, if they hadn’t come north and hadn’t come to Hurricane.

            But coming to Hurricane was what had given them to each other in the first place. They would have had no reason to cross paths on Earth, if they had stayed there.

            So Harry was thinking, and comforting himself with the thinking, and, he hoped, Draco, when Draco said, Harry. It isn’t—it isn’t controlling what we think, anymore. I can think anything I like, and I can feel it trying to prevent me, but it can’t.

            Harry didn’t question him. For one thing, he’d had the experience of free thoughts himself in the last few minutes, to prove Draco right. For another, he thought that he didn’t want to hurt Draco again by questioning him about something true.

            And for another, he was concentrating on the bond and yanking with all his might, driving their magic and their thoughts together, pulling against Bodiless, like a lunge of wild animals against the chains that held them.

            There was a shivering screech, and the world around them broke and fell in shards. Winds tried to batter them, but they were free, as long as they concentrated on the bond they were free, and Draco was the one who had discovered it, brilliant wonderful Draco, and Harry wasn’t so bad himself, and as long as their minds ran together it was brilliant, and they wheeled—

            And they fled like great birds to the east and south, while Bodiless roared and battered at the winds behind them.

*

            unneeded: Yes! Harry trusts Hermione in a way that he wouldn't trust a lot of other people.

            SP777: My main problem is thinking of a way to make Quidditch moves sufficiently different and exciting for that story.
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Wondrous Lands and Oceans